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

‘direct,
blatant and risky’.34 He said to
Churchill, ‘the Americans are perpetually eager to do something.’
35 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 chapter, 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