The Anglo-Persian Oil Company: Oil in the Middle East
The Anglo-Persian Oil Company: Oil in the Middle East
At the dawn of the twentieth century when the last gasps of the Imperial Age still gripped the world, Iran – then called Persia – had caught the predatory attention of both Russia and Great Britain for two primary reasons.
First, Persia was an ideally situated buffer state, squeezed between the Russian Empire to the north and the British Raj who ruled to the east in nearby India. A self-protective strategy, therefore, had both the Russian Bear and the English Bulldog casting their eyes covetously toward the Peacock Throne.
Secondly, Persia was sitting on vast subterranean oceans of oil. In 1901, the Anglo-Persian Oil company was formed, with the British Anglo faction of the ostensible partnership making out like the bandits they were. In 1935 APOC was renamed the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, and years later, it became British Petroleum Company—or BP, as you may currently know it.
After World War 1, Germans began to arrive in droves and found it sympathetic territory largely because the country had a new, unabashedly pro-German leader. Reza Khan became Reza Shah Pahlavi, the Shadow of the Almighty, the King of Kings, the Vice Regent of God, triumphantly in 1925.
Reza Shah worked to transform Tehran from a crowded, disorganized city to an updated, twentieth-century city. Parts of Tehran soon had wide, tree-lined boulevards, honking cars, cafés, even electricity and dial telephones. A decree prohibited camels from entering the city gates. But the outskirts of the city were different. Here Tehran was crisscrossed by a maze of narrow alleyways, still very much gripped by the heart of a nomadic darkness: a sand-strewn, dusty world of yapping packs of mongrel dogs, ditches filled with filmy water, of mangy horses and flea-bitten donkeys. There was no sewage system, no electricity. Beyond the shiny new boulevards, the past had not yet become past.
These were troubled times for the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. In 1933, the company and its British leaders made an agreement with Reza Shah; an agreement which promised to offer workers better pay, more opportunities for career growth, and build schools, hospitals, roads and telephone system. Unfortunately, AIOC did not fulfill these promises, which caused tension. Then came World War 2, which resulted in Britain and the Soviet Union invading and occupying Iran so that they could secure the oilfields—and create a safe route to transport oil to the USSR.
The Third Reich also had interest in the area, creating a struggle for control of the area. “The possibility of exerting strong pressure on Turkey and Iran,” the Nazi war planners wrote, “improves the prospect of making direct or indirect use of the countries in the struggle against England…The struggle against the British positions in the Mediterranean and in Western Asia will be continued by converging attacks launched…through Iran.”
The oil in this part of the Middle East has shaped, and still shapes, other nations’ policies and interests in the area. The oil money that flowed into Tehran, Britain, Russia, and Germany created the foundation for the city to become the setting of one of the most dramatic assassination attempts of all-time—the attempt to kill Stalin, Churchill, and FDR in one fell swoop as they met there in secret in 1943. The stakes? Nothing less than the fate of the world. My new book, NIGHT OF THE ASSASSINS, tells the thrilling real-life history of the assassination attempt, spies, and the bravery of the men who kept the Allied leaders safe.
Night of the Assassins
The Untold Story of Hitler’s Plot to Kill FDR, Churchill, and Stalin