The problem was that there was no blood line back to Cyrus the Great or any other Persian imperial dynasty and even after more than two decades on the throne the Shah’s grip on power was anything but assured. The reality of his situation had been brought home to him over a decade ago. After Iran’s first democratic government had been elected it had turned on him and nationalised British and American oil interests in the country, whereupon the same western ‘idealists’ and ‘statesmen’ who had pressured him into accepting and implementing so-called ‘democratic reforms’ had ruthlessly conspired with him to crush his nation’s ill-starred experiment with representative democracy. Ever since then in the eyes of many of his people, he had been no more than a Western puppet.
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi had never forgotten the lessons of the long drawn out excruciatingly painful and humiliating Abadan Crisis of 1951 to 1954. In the intervening years he had always striven to avoid a repetition of that conflict. Every time he thought, read or heard the name ‘Abadan’ it reminded him that oil was both his kingdom’s strength and its horribly vulnerable Achilles heel. The potential wealth of Iran’s massive oilfields — until recently thought to be mainly in the south but now known to also stretch across the northern border into Kurdish Iraq and the former Soviet Republics of the Trans-Caucasus — might one day give him a trump card at the international table. Many of his advisors believed that the October War was a god-given second opportunity to successful re-nationalise the oilfields and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s huge refinery complex at Abadan. They were fools; whatever else had changed in the post-war World the Royal Navy still bestrode the seas.
Abadan was like a running sore on the conscience of the kingdom; a wound that ought to have been lanced years ago. Nevertheless, Mohammed Reza was nothing if not a cautious man and he was wise enough to understand that in the aftermath of the October War — in the long run — history was on his side.
It was just a question of having the patience to play that long game and to wait for the so-called ‘victors’ of the recent war to turn inward and surrender to him, without a fight what was rightfully his.
The British had built a giant refinery complex at Abadan, a forty-two mile long island bounded on the east by the Shatt al-Arab and on the west by the Arvand River, a waterway formed by the confluence of the Euphrates and the Tigris at al-Qurnah some eighty miles to the north-west. Some two dozen miles across at its widest point Abadan was both an Iranian provincial capital and — in fact, if not in strict legal terms, possession being nine-tenths of the law — a British Imperial Protectorate, strategically placed at the head of the Persian Gulf.
The current situation, as restored after the unpleasantness of the early 1950s, was one based on concessions made to the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in Mohammed Reza’s father’s time. Mohammad Mosaddegh, the kingdom’s first elected Prime Minister had damned those concessions as being ‘immoral as well as illegal’ but that had cut no ice in post-World War II London. Clement Atlee and later a re-elected Winston Churchill had complacently clung to the illusion that Iranian oil was actually British oil on the grounds that it was the British who had discovered it, it was the British who had developed the substantial infrastructure required to extract and transport it to Abadan, and on that island it was the British who had built the largest oil refinery on the planet. By 1951 Abadan was Great Britain’s biggest and by far its most valuable overseas asset and basically, for commercial, strategic and profoundly political reasons it was unthinkable that one day it might simply be appropriated by a bunch of foreigners. Moreover, there was always the fear that if Britain allowed Iran to get away with ‘stealing’ Abadan it would set an appalling precedent, and that thereafter ‘nationalists’ everywhere ‘could abrogate British concessions with impunity.’
Mohammad Mosaddegh had dreamed of using the wealth generated by Iran’s oil, and the vast profits of the Abadan refineries to fight poverty and to educate the Iranian people; in Britain the outgoing Labour Government and the incoming Conservative Government had viewed the nationalisation of the Iranian oil industry as straightforward ‘theft’. Moreover, fearing a long term interruption to the flow of Arabian oil to the fast rebuilding war-ravaged industries of Western Europe and to the booming American post-war economy, Britain and America were alarmed that Iran might ‘go rogue’. Immediately there was talk of a Soviet occupation ‘by the back door’. To the Western superpowers it was axiomatic that the gratuitous ‘theft’ of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s property could not be allowed to stand unchallenged.
In the event exactly what Mohammed Reza had feared would happen, happened.
Firstly, after the British and most of the American workers at Abadan had been expelled from Iran it proved impossible to recruit skilled engineers and technicians to maintain and to safely operate even a small proportion of the oil fields, or the Abadan refinery complex.
Secondly, oil production slumped disastrously and serious accidents became common. Anybody who had eyes could see that in a handful of years the Iranian oil industry would be in ruins.
Thirdly, the Royal Navy blockaded the Persian Gulf and in July 1952 an Italian registered tanker, the Rose Mary, was intercepted and obliged to dock at Aden because the Royal Navy deemed the ship’s cargo to be ‘stolen goods’.
Thereafter, there were no more oil exports from Iran, people started to starve in the backstreets of Tehran, previously suppressed religious tensions began to re-surface and the people around the Shah started to panic. As always happens in such situations there were rumours of coups, palace revolts and an end to the Pahlavi dynasty.
Had it not been for the timely overthrow of Mosaddegh’s elected government on the 19th August 1953, by a second coup d’état — the first had failed forcing the Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to flee to Rome — organised in London and Langley Virginia, the Shah’s days would have been numbered. As was common in those years the British and the Americans, those two indefatigable pillars of freedom and democracy, invariably took two or three attempts to mount a successful coup d’état. MI6 and the Central Intelligence Agency had bought the wrong people the first time around and Operation Ajax, the name they had given the debacle, had had to be mounted a second time. The second attempt was better funded and carried out mindful of the errors and sloppy planning which had been the downfall of its earlier flawed incarnation. Second time around the right people had been bought and the CIA had made it worth Mohammad Reza’s while — in hard currency — to play along.
Of course, things had had to be finessed the following year; the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) had ceased, on paper, to be a British fiefdom, instead nominally falling under the control of an international consortium. Iran had emerged from the negotiations with a deal that guaranteed it twenty-five percent of the profits of the ‘consortium’ as opposed to its pre-crisis share of twenty percent of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s declared profits. However, control of the Abadan ‘investment’ still rested with its main shareholder, British Petroleum and its partner, Royal Dutch Shell which together retained fifty-four percent of the ordinary shares in AIOC. Given that European and American oil companies operating in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Gulf commonly shared the profits of their drilling and refining operation on a fifty-fifty basis with their hosts; to the Shah of Iran the deal still left a bitter taste in the mouth ten years later.