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 beloved figure of enormous charisma to Iranians of all social classes." But the writer Gerard de Villiers described him as "a pint-sized trouble-maker" who had "the agility of a goat." Others spoke of his "yellow face" and complained that he would hold cabinet meetings while wearing pink pyjamas and lying in bed. In so far as there is any memory of Mossadeq outside Iran, it is of a man mentally unbalanced.
Had Mossadeq been more bloodthirsty he might well have survived. He led a loose coalition of liberals and nationalists called the National Front but with important if uncertain support from the Communist left and the religious right. He was under constant economic pressure because the AIOC had arranged a successful boycott of Iranian oil exports.
The British angled for US support in this Cold War era by claiming that
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unless Mossadeq was ousted there would be a Communist takeover. There was little in this and Mossadeq never got support from the Soviet Union, but Eisenhower and Churchill came to fully support his overthrow. On the British side the coup was organised by 'Monty' Wodehouse, a veteran of the Greek resistance to the Germans in World War II and later a Tory MP. The leading figure for the Americans was Kermit Roosevelt,
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grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, and for years a US intelligence officer in the Middle East.
It was Roosevelt who supported the crumbling confidence of the young Shah and orchestrated the actions of paid mobs and royalist officers. The Shah tried first to dismiss Mossadeq and then, when this failed, fled the country on August 16. But the coup went ahead anyway. Mossadeq was arrested and on August 22 the Shah flew back in triumph to Iran. A quarter-century later, he was forced to flee once more, never to return.
The revolutionaries immediately executed their opponents, vowing not to make "the Mossadeq mistake" again. 
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