British Diplomatic Oil Crisis: Contemporary Anglo-Saxon Geopolitical Rivalries in the Persian Gulf: Drawing a Lesson? Or Sir Anthony Eden‘s Delusion of Grandeur.

to be
allowed in a strategically important part of the world, where
both governments had vested interests. Woodhouse pointed out to his
opposite numbers at the CIA, that if nothing was done about Dr.
Musaddiq, a Tudeh (Communist) party coup may soon take place in
Iran.

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’,32 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.’ 33 Through 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 the 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