1954: THE BRITISH CONSERVATIVE GOVERNMENT AND THE ENDING OF THE NATIONALISATION OF THE ANGLO-IRANIAN OIL COMPANY’S CRISIS.
In Washington, C.M. Woodhouse presented his plan to the CIA for a coup in Iran. The plan was based on the well-financed organisation of the Rashidian brothers in Teheran, which, as he put it, ‘included senior officers of the army and police, deputies and senators, clergies, merchants, newspaper editors, and elder statesmen, as well as mob leaders’,¹ and Britain’s long-standing link with tribal leaders in the south of Iran.
While in Washington, the senior MI6 officer met Kermit Roosevelt, the grandson of Theodore Roosevelt, the ex-American President. Kermit Roosevelt was the head of the CIA operation in the Middle East and had just arrived from Teheran. Woodhouse put the British proposal to him. Roosevelt responded by saying that he ‘had been thinking along similar lines and had received offers of backing from influential Iranians.’²Through the autumn and winter of 1952 was the period when the Anglo-American plan of covert operation against Musaddiq began, but it was not until July of 1953 that the Eisenhower administration took a firm decision to proceed. John Foster Dulles, the American Secretary of State, presided over a meeting in Washington and gave the go-ahead. At this point an ironic situation in Britain developed. As was noted earlier, ironically it was the Labour Foreign Secretary, Herbert Morrison, who gave firm instructions for Musaddiq’s overthrow by covert means, but Anthony Eden, the Conservative Foreign Secretary, though outraged by the Iranian act of nationalisation, turned out to be as reluctant to approve this kind of operation as any Labour Foreign Secretary might have been. In Eden’s judgement, this kind of operation was ‘direct, blatant and risky’.³ He said to Churchill, ‘the Americans are perpetually eager to do something.’4 The backing that the Iranian Prime Minister, Dr. Musaddiq, was receiving from the Tudeh party, by the summer of 1953, being concerned about communist influence in Iran, the turbulent political situation in Iran, which was described earlier in this article, and the fear of challenge from the Soviet Union, changed US policy towards Musaddiq, as has already been explained. Eventually Eden did not have to approve of the action, as he underwent the operation related to his gall bladder complication, and it was not until October 1953 that he returned to the Foreign Office. It was the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill himself, who gave the go-ahead.
Churchill had always been involved in high politics of Iranian oil. It was Churchill who played a major role in the conversion of the Royal Navy from coal to oil. Furthermore, Churchill had a crucial part in the British Government’s buying of a majority of shares in the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Thus, his interest in Iranian oil’s power politics started well before the First World War. Churchill had calculated at that period that the saving on the price paid for oil alone would amount to about £40 million, and he had stated:
On this basis it may be that the aggregate profits, realised and potential, of this investment may be estimated at a sum not merely sufficient to pay all the programme of ships, great and small of that year and for the whole pre-War oil fuel installation, but are such that we may not unreasonably expect that one day we shall be entitled also to claim that the mighty fleets laid down in 1912, 1913 and 1914, the greatest ever built by any power in an equal period, were added to the British Navy without costing a single penny to the taxpayer.5
- B. LAPPING, op. cit., p. 270.
- Ibid, p. 271.
- J. A. BILL and W. R. LOUIS, op. cit., p. 283.
- Ibid, p. 251.
- W. S. CHURCHILL, The World Crisis, Vol. 1, in ibid, p. 253.
