To understand why the United States and Israel launched
Operation Epic Fury on February 28th, 2026, you have to go back
73 years. Back to a summer morning in
Tehran. Back to ACIA officer with a
suitcase full of cash and a plan to topple a democratically
elected government. Back to the single event that
more than any other, planted the seeds of everything that
followed. This is a bonus episode of Epic
Fury, the US Iran war podcast. This episode is different from
our Daily News briefings. There are no breaking
developments here. No missile counts, no death
tolls. Instead, this episode exists to
answer one question. How do we get here?
Because the war you've been hearing about in our daily
episodes did not begin on February 28th, 2026.
It began in many ways, in August 1953.
August 19th, 1953. Tehran, Iran.
Iran at that moment was a democracy.
A young, imperfect, turbulent democracy, but a democracy
nonetheless. Its Prime Minister was a man
named Mohammed Mazadek. He was 71 years old, Oxford and
Paris educated, known for fainting dramatically in
Parliament to make political points, and beloved by millions
of Iranians for one central achievement.
He had nationalized Iran's oil. For decades, Iran's vast oil
reserves have been controlled almost entirely by the Anglo
Iranian Oil Company, a British corporation that later became
British Petroleum. The arrangement was, by any
modern standard, extraordinary in its imbalance.
Iran received a fraction of the profits from its own natural
resources, while Britain grew wealthy from them.
In 1951, Mosaddek pushed through the nationalization of those oil
fields, declaring that Iran's oil belonged to Iran.
The Iranian parliament voted unanimously in support.
The Iranian public celebrated in the streets.
Britain was furious. London immediately imposed an
embargo on Iranian oil, strangling the country's
economy. Britain also appealed to the
United States for help, making the Cold War argument that
Mazadek's weakness was making Iran vulnerable to a communist
takeover by the Soviet aligned to the party.
It was an argument that resonated in Washington, where
the Eisenhower administration was already deeply alarmed by
Soviet expansion. What followed was a covert
operation run jointly by Britain's MI 6 and the American
CIA, codenamed Operation Boot by the British in Operation Ajax by
the Americans. The CIA's lead operative on the
ground was Kermit Roosevelt Junior, the grandson of
President Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt arrived in Tehran with
suitcases of cash and a sophisticated plan to
manufacture a political crisis. CIA funded agents posed as
Mazdek supporters and staged violent demonstrations designed
to discredit him. Prosha mobs were paid and bussed
into Tehran. Newspaper editors were bribed to
print anti Mozdek propaganda. Religious leaders were recruited
to turn against him. False flag attacks were carried
out and blamed on communists to stoke fear among Iran's
conservative population. It was, in modern terminology, A
disinformation and destabilization campaign of
remarkable sophistication for its era.
The first coup attempt on August 15th failed.
Mozdek's forces arrested many of the plotters.
The Shah, who had been persuaded to sign royal decrees dismissing
Mosaddek, lost his nerve and fled to Rome.
Roosevelt, who was supposed to have left Iran by then, stayed
and planned a second attempt four days later, on August 19th.
The second attempt succeeded. Pro Shah forces and sympathetic
military officers, with CIA financial and logistical
backing, seized key points across Tehran.
Mosaddek loyalists were overwhelmed.
Between 200 and 300 people were killed in the fighting in the
streets of Tehran. Mosaddek was arrested, tried by
a military court, convicted of treason, sentenced to three
years in prison, and then placed under house arrest for the
remainder of his life. He died in 1967.
Never having regained his freedom.
The Shah Muhammad Rezapalavi returned to power.
He would rule Iran for the next 26 years, supported and
sustained by the United States. In the immediate aftermath of
the coup, Iran's oil fields were handed back, but this time the
arrangement was even more favorable to the West. the
United States strong arm the shine to giving American,
British, and French oil companies a 40% ownership stake
in Iran's oil production for the next 25 years.
The CIA did not officially acknowledge its role in the 1953
coup until 2013, sixty years after the fact.
The reason this matters, and the reason this episode starts here,
is that the 1953 coup is the foundational grievance that
shaped everything that followed in Iran's relationship with the
United States. Every generation of Iranians
learned what their government described as the lesson of
Mazadek that Iran could not trust the West, that America
would manipulate, undermine and betray any Iranian government
that did not serve its interests, and that the price of
defying the United States was imprisonment, exile, or death.
The Shah ruled Iran for 26 years.
His modernization program, which he called the White Revolution,
brought real economic development and social changes,
including expanded rights for women.
But his rule was also brutally authoritarian.
His secret police force, Sabich, trained in part by the CIA, was
notorious for the torture and imprisonment of political
opponents. 10s of thousands of Iranians were arrested.
Hundreds, by conservative estimates, were executed.
By the late 1970's, the combination of cultural
resentment at the Shah's Westernization, political
repression, economic inequality and the legacy of American
interference had created a powder keg.
The match was provided by Ayatollah Ruhala Khomeini, an
elderly Shia cleric who'd been exiled first to Iraq and then to
France, and who had spent years building a revolutionary
movement through recorded cassette tape smuggled into
Iran. In 1978, mass protests swept the
country. In January 1979, the Shah fled
Iran and entered exile. He would never return.
On February 1st, 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini flew back to Tehran
from Paris to a reception of millions.
The Islamic Republic of Iran was declared.
Khomeini became its supreme leader, and the country that had
been one of America's closest allies in the Middle East
overnight became one of its most implacable enemies.
The break was made permanent in November 1979 when a group of
Iranian students, calling themselves the Students
following the line of the Imams, stormed the United States
Embassy in Tehran and took 52 American diplomats and staff
hostage. Their stated justification was
the same grievance that had never died.
They believe the United States was planning another coup to
reinstall the Shah, just as it had in 1953.
The Shah had been allowed into the United States for medical
treatment, and the students demanded his extradition to face
trial in Iran. The hostage crisis lasted 444
days. It destroyed the presidency of
Jimmy Carter. It fundamentally altered
American domestic politics, and it's severed diplomatic
relations between the United States and Iran, a severing that
has never been formally repaired in the 47 years since.
The 52 American hostages were released on January 20th, 1981,
the exact day Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as president, a
timing that many historians argue was deliberately
orchestrated by the Iranians to maximize Carter's humiliation.
The 1980s brought a new dimension to the conflict.
In September 1980, Iraq, led by Saddam Hussein, invaded Iran.
The war that followed was one of the most brutal conflicts of the
20th century, lasting 8 years, killing between 500,000 and
1,000,000 people and consuming an entire generation of young
Iranians in trench warfare reminiscent of the First World
War. The United States, viewing
Saddam Hussein as a useful counterweight to the Islamic
Republic, largely supported Iraq.
It provided intelligence, financing and materials,
including precursor chemicals that were used in chemical
weapons attacks on Iranian troops and Kurdish civilians.
It was during the Iran Iraq War that a relatively obscure
politician named Ali Khamenei rose to prominence.
He served as Iran's president from 1981 to 1989, building a
reputation as a hardliner and loyal revolutionary.
When Ayatollah Khomeini died in June 1989, it was Khamenei who
was chosen as his successor as Supreme Leader, a post he would
hold for 37 years until his death.
In the opening hours of Operation Epic Fury.
The Iran Iraq War also had a crucial side to mention that
would shape the next 4 decades of American foreign policy.
In 1983, a truck bomb drove into the headquarters of the United
States Marine Barracks in Beirut, Lebanon. 241 American
marines and sailors were killed. A second bomb killed 58 French
soldiers. The attack was carried out by
Hezbollah, A Lebanese Shia militia that had been founded
with direct support from Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard
Corps. It remains the deadliest single
attack on United States military personnel since Vietnam, and it
established the template for Iran's strategy of using proxy
forces to strike American targets while maintaining a
degree of plausible deniability. In 1986, the Iran Contra Fair
revealed that the Reagan administration had been secretly
selling weapons to Iran, the same country publicly designated
as a sponsor of terrorism, in exchange for help securing the
release of American hostages held in Lebanon by Iranian
backed groups. The proceeds from those weapons
sales were secretly funneled to right wing Contra rebels in
Nicaragua in violation of a congressional ban.
The scandal nearly destroyed Reagan's presidency and
illustrated the extraordinary contradictions and hypocrisies
that had come to define the United States relationship with
the Islamic Republic. The 1990s brought relative
quiet, indirect military confrontation, but the
foundations of the next phase of conflict were being laid.
In 1995, the United States imposed A comprehensive embargo
on trade with Iran, and in the late 1990s a reformist wave
swept Iranian politics with the election of President Mohammed
Ghatami, who reached out toward the West and offered a vision of
what he called a dialogue of Civilizations.
For a brief period, the possibility of a genuine
rapprochement seemed real. Then came September 11, 2001,
and with it everything changed again.
In an extraordinary historical irony, Iran was among the first
countries to offer condolences to the United States after the
attacks. Iranians held spontaneous
candlelight vigils in Tehran. Iran had its own reasons to
oppose Al Qaeda and the Taliban, Sunni extremists who viewed Shia
Iran as heretical. Behind the scenes, Iranian and
American officials cooperated to some degree.
In the early stages of the campaign against the Taliban in
Afghanistan, the possibility of a genuine strategic realignment
between Washington and Tehran seemed briefly within reach.
Then, in January 2002, President George W Bush delivered his
State of the Union address. He named Iran, Iraq and North
Korea as an axis of evil. The phrase landed in Tehran like
a bomb. Iranian reformists who have been
arguing for engagement with the West were humiliated.
Hardliners who had always argued that America could never be
trusted were vindicated. The window of possibility
closed. Months after that speech, it was
revealed that Iran had been secretly operating a uranium
enrichment facility at Natan's and a heavy water reactor at
Iraq, nuclear facilities that had never been disclosed to the
International Atomic Energy Agency.
Iran insisted its nuclear program was entirely civilian in
purpose, intended to generate electricity and reduce
dependence on its own oil reserves.
Western governments, led by the United States and Israel, argue
that the program had a weapons dimension.
The debate over Iran's nuclear intentions became the defining
geopolitical question of the next two decades.
Between 2003 and 2015, a complex and exhausting series of
diplomatic negotiations, international sanctions, United
Nations Security Council resolutions, and covert sabotage
campaigns unfolded around Iran's nuclear program. the United
States and its European allies Britain, France, and Germany,
the group known as the EU 3, negotiated repeatedly with Iran,
seeking limits on enrichment in exchange for sanctions relief.
Iran enriched. Sanctions tightened.
Iran enriched more. In 2010, a sophisticated
computer virus called Stuxnet, widely attributed to the United
States and Israel, infected the control systems of the
centrifuges at Iran's Natanz enrichment facility and
destroyed approximately 1000 of them.
It was one of the first acts of cyber warfare in history and set
a precedent for the use of digital weapons against physical
infrastructure. Iran also escalated covertly.
Its nuclear scientists began to be assassinated on the streets
of Tehran. 4 scientists were killed between 2010 and 2012 and
operations widely attributed to Israel's Mossad intelligence
service. In 2020, Mossenfoq Rosada,
described by Western intelligence as the father of
Iran's nuclear weapons program, was assassinated in an ambush on
a road outside Tehran in an operation attributed to Israel
using a remote control machine gun mounted on a truck.
The diplomatic effort reached its high point in July 2015 with
the signing of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action,
the JCPOA, known simply as the Iran nuclear deal.
The agreement was reached between Iran and the five
permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, the
United States, Russia, China, Britain and France, plus Germany
and the European Union. Under the JCPOA, Iran agreed to
reduce its uranium enrichment to 3.67%, well below the 90%
required for weapons Gray material.
It agreed to reduce its stockpile of enriched uranium by
98%. It agreed to allow the most
intrusive international inspections of its nuclear
facilities in history. In exchange, sanctions that had
crippled Iran's economy were lifted.
Iranian celebrated in the streets.
The deal was celebrated by its supporters as a historic
diplomatic achievement that had peacefully constrained Iran's
nuclear program without military action.
It was denounced by its opponents, led by Israel and
Republican politicians in the United States, as naive,
unverifiable, and insufficiently permanent.
The deal, they argued, merely delayed rather than eliminated
Iran's nuclear ambitions. In May 2018, President Donald
Trump, in his first term, unilaterally withdrew the United
States from the JCPOA. He called it the worst deal ever
negotiated. He reimposed sweeping economic
sanctions on Iran under what his administration called a maximum
pressure campaign, targeting Iran's financial, oil and
shipping sectors and any foreign firm doing business with Iran.
Iran's economy contracted sharply.
The value of Iran's currency, the real collapsed.
Inflation soared. Living standards fell
dramatically. Iran responded by gradually and
publicly abandoning the limits it had accepted under the JCPOA.
It increased enrichment. It reduced cooperation with IAA
inspectors. It accelerated centrifuge
development. By the time Trump returned to
office for his second term in January 2025, Iran had
accumulated 460kg of uranium enriched to 60%, enough, experts
said, to produce multiple nuclear weapons if enriched
further. And in a covert underground
facility that had not been declared to the IEA, Iran had
been secretly stockpiling highly enriched uranium at even higher
levels. The last piece of the chain
leading to Operation Epic Fury involved the escalating shadow
war between Iran and Israel. In April 2024, Israel
assassinated senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps
commanders in an air strike on Iran's embassy in Damascus,
Syria. Iran responded in April 2024
with its first direct attack on Israeli territory, a massive
drone and missile barrage of over 300 projectiles.
Israel retaliated with strikes on an Iranian radar
installation. The cycle of direct
confrontation between Iran and Israel, previously always
conducted through proxies and deniable operations, had broken
into the open. In June 2025, the Trump
administration, in its second term working with Israel,
launched a 12 day military operation against Iran's nuclear
facilities. The operation destroyed
significant portions of Iran's nuclear infrastructure and
degraded its missile arsenal. Iran retaliated.
A ceasefire was eventually reached.
Iran formally terminated the JCPOA in October 2025.
In late December 2025 and January 2026, the largest
protests in Iran since the 1979 revolution erupted across the
country. Driven by a catastrophic
economic crisis, the government responded with deadly force.
Estimates of the death toll among protesters range from 3000
to 30,000. Trump expressed public support
for the protesters. Nuclear negotiations resumed in
February 2026. On February 27th, Oman's foreign
minister declared that peace was within reach.
That same day, Iranian negotiators told American envoy
Steve Witkoff that Iran had 460kg of 60% enriched uranium,
enough for 11 nuclear bombs. The next day, American
intelligence confirmed that hidden underground facility
contained uranium enriched to even higher levels and that Iran
was two weeks away from a functional nuclear weapon.
On February 28th, 2026, at 2:30 in the morning Eastern Time, the
bombs fell. Everything you have heard in
this episode, the coup of 1953, the revolution of 1979, the
hostage crisis, the Iran Iraq war, the proxy networks, the
nuclear program, the JCPOA, the maximum pressure campaign, the
assassinations, the shadow war, all of it is the context for the
conflict we are covering in our daily episodes.
Not as justification for any side, not as an argument for or
against what is happening right now, but as the factual record
of how 73 years of history between two countries led to
bombs falling on Tehran on a Saturday morning in February
2026. History never begins with the
first headline. It begins decades before.
And understanding where this conflict came from is essential
to understanding where it is going.
That is the bonus episode of Epic Fury, the US Iran War
podcast. For daily coverage of the
ongoing conflict, subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcast, or
YouTube. Every new episode lands directly
with you. Share this episode with someone
who wants to understand not just what is happening, but why.