Reflections on the Abadan Crisis, 1950-51
A seminar held at the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, on 8 December 2022, to launch Britain and the Abadan Crisis, 1950-51
Edited by FCDO Historians
Left to right: Professor Ali Ansari, Gill Bennett, Sir Geoffrey Adams
Thank you for coming, and welcome to what is actually our first in-person event since 2019, before the pandemic. Welcome, too, to the first event organised by the FCDO Historians, as wehavebeen since2020. It is wonderful to bebackin this roomandto seesomanyold friends and new faces.
Just to give you a bit of background to what we are going to be doing today, if I can take you back right to the beginning of the pandemic. At that point, we were forced to change our working practices, as everybody else was. For many months, we worked entirely from home, and during that time many new tasks came our way. We had to give historical perspectives on the pandemic itself; on Black Lives Matter, which emerged that summer; on Russian disinformation; and, most recently, of course, on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. One thing we could not do was work on our main series of documents, Documents on British Policy Overseas, our flagship series, but we did not give up on publishing entirely.
On the contrary, thanks to the initiative of my colleague Richard Smith, we organised a new series, Documents from the British Archives, which we published free online; and also, if you wanted, you could buy a copy cheaply from Amazon. The idea was to showcase selections of some of our earlier publications, and also to make available documents alreadyin The National Archives that were relatively little known, difficult to access or simply too big to be conveniently consulted.
Since 2020, we have published four volumes in this new series. They cover the Potsdam Conference in 1945, the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the Helsinki Conference of 1975 and the Lancaster House Conference on the independence of Zimbabwe in 1979.
Throughout that time, we had something bigger in mind – and something we had been talking about to Ali Ansari for quite a long time – and that was the publication of Rohan Butler’s 1962 report on the relinquishment of Abadan. Butler’s report was, of course, important in many ways we shall be exploring today but, at 300,000 words, it was intimidatingly long. Anybody who tried to look at it or use it in The National Archives had, as we know, great difficulty Of course, when we looked at it, we found this fairly intimidating too, but Gill Bennett solved the problem by typing the entire thing out herself. That is the way we do it!
This is the publication we are presenting to you today, and it is freely available on the table over there. Please take a copy when you leave. It is by far the largest in the series so far, but also, we hope, far more readable, far more accessible, with new editorial material, as you will hear in a minute, and also some rather important documents that resulted from Butler’s original report
For the presentation today, we are joined by the two experts who contributed, respectively, an introductory essay and an afterword to the report: Professor Ali Ansari of St Andrews University and my colleague Gill Bennett They are chaired by Sir Geoffrey Adams, who of course, as you know, is a former Ambassador to Iran, but also an old friend of the FCDO Historians. Manyof us will remember that he presided over the release of another major report on Iran 11 years ago, which was Nicholas Browne’s investigation into the events surrounding the fall of the Shah in 1978 and 1979. Of course, many people in the room have their own personal experience of working in Iran, and we very much hope they will contribute to the discussion later today.
We will not be joined, as we had hoped to be, by the Right Honourable Jack Straw, at least not in the physical sense. Jack has been quite ill recently. He is doing well now, but, on his doctor’s advice, has decided it would be unwise to jeopardise his recovery by attending in person. However, as one who was deeply engaged with Iran as Foreign Secretary, and as the author, as many will know, of The English Job: Understanding Iran and Why It Distrusts Britain, published in 2019, Jack was keen to contribute his thoughts on the Butler report We have recorded a short interview with him, and we will play part of that later this afternoon. Finally, we have another reason to be together today again, as manyhave been suspecting, and that is to say goodbye to my predecessor as Chief Historian, Gill Bennett, on what she claims will be her final retirement We will have some drinks next door after this main event.
Before I finish, I thought I should just make one more reflection That is that we are meeting at a time when the people of Iran are, again, courageously standing up against an oppressive regime, and I am sure that all of us will have in mind today a great people with a remarkable heritage. I hope that their aspirations for freedom will come closer to being realised this time Thank you.
Thank you very much indeed, Patrick. Many congratulations to you and your team for this fantastic initiative. I am delighted to be here, back in this building, to celebrate it. As Patrick said, I am just the Chair of this event I will introduce first Gill Bennett, and then Ali Ansari. Just in case there is anyone who does not know her well, Gill joined the FCDO Historians in 1972 and was Chief Historian from 1995 to 2005. At the same time, she was senior editor of the official documentary history of British foreign policy, Documents on British Policy Overseas (DBPO). She specialised in the history of secret intelligence and has published extensively on it, as well as a book on decision-making in British foreign policy, Six Moments of Crisis.
As Patrick said, this report – which is monumental, as I discovered once I started typing it, but as they say on Mastermind, ‘I have started so I will finish’ – exemplifies one of the two major strands of the work of the FCDO Historians, who have, as I hope you all here know, two main roles One is to publish the official documentary record of British foreign policy in our series, Documents on British Policy Overseas, and other publications. The other is to give advice to Ministers and senior officials, which is as it sounds. What is it? It is, ‘How long is a piece of string?’ It can be something as small as, ‘Could we have a joke for a minister to put in a speech?’ That does not happen very often, funnily enough. It can also be a monumental piece of research, which takes months, if not years Indeed, that was the case with the Butler report on Abadan.
There are some very peculiar aspects of this particular report. As you will read when you look at Butler’s own preface, it was commissioned because the then Cabinet Secretary, Sir Norman Brook, in 1957 sent a note round to various government departments saying he thought it would be a good idea for departments to prepare an in-depth study of a particular episode in policy. It is what we would call a ‘lessons-learned exercise’ today.
Then there was a lot of sucking of teeth and thinking, especially in the Foreign Office, at least In 1959, a special committee convened by the Permanent Under-Secretary decided that Rohan Butler should be asked to do such a studyof the relinquishment of the British interest in the oil fields in the Abadan crisis that went on from 1950-51. The actual commissioning was done in 1959, which was three years after Suez. Nobody mentioned Suez, and you will see that my little afterword to this publication is called ‘Don’t mention Suez’, but there are continuities, which Iwill come to in a moment. It was thought to be an appropriate episode that would have ramifications both in terms of policy and in terms of office organisation and how effective the Foreign Office was at dealing with the crisis. The answer, basically, was ‘not very’.
Anyway, Butler set to work on it, and he worked on it with Margaret Lambert, as she then was
later, my colleague Heather [Yasamee]’s colleague and mine, Margaret Pelly – and it was brought out in 1962. Now, when it was sent to the Cabinet Office, the Cabinet Secretary had forgotten all about it. Indeed, no other department produced one of these things, so we were the only one. However, the Foreign Office was not quite sure what to do with it. The then Permanent Under-Secretary read it, and it is very critical of British policy, and indeed of policymakers, although more restrained than others were.
They asked Lord Strang, who had been Permanent Under-Secretary at the time of the Abadan crisis, to read Butler’s report and write a commentary, which he did over Christmas. He was much less restrained than Butler in his criticism of individuals, shall we say, both Ministers –in particular, Ministers – but also of some officials. Unlike Butler, who felt it was not quite proper for him to criticise people by name, Strang had no such inhibitions, but it also led him to muse on whether the way that foreign policy was conducted by the Office was really right. Could it be more effective? Could Ministers be more effective? He thought they could.
Strang’s commentary was sent out to selected embassies and to various other people Bynow, we are in the beginning of 1963, just at the time when Britain had been given its first rejection bywhat was then the European Economic Community. When ambassadors and others replied, they had a lot to say about the failures of British policy in Europe, as well as in the particular case of Abadan.
They said so much that, when the replies came back, Butler had to be asked to produce another shorter report synthesising the comments; he called that ‘A New Perspective on Diplomacy’, which is also reproduced, as is Strang’s commentary, in our volume. In that, he made various recommendations about how the Foreign Office could work better. That report directly led to the formation of the Policy Planners, what is now called the Strategy Unit, so it did have important organisational consequences.
I just want to say a brief bit about the actual content. As it so happens, concurrently with working on this, I have been editing the latest volume in the DBPO series, which is called The Geopolitics of Suez: British Foreign Policy in 1956. As you might imagine, reading about 1950-51 and 1956 at the same time brings quite a lot of things to mind; one is that it is an absolutely straight line through and a lot of the things that went wrong in Abadan were the same things that go wrong later on for very much the same reasons. I am not going to go into it all; you can read it. I typed it; you can jolly well read it!
It is a line of policy, and I just want to draw attention to a couple of documents that are printed in another of our volumes from 1947 and foreshadow this. In January 1947, Attlee, the Prime Minister, of course, at the time, was very worried about the British economic situation, which was pretty parlous, and the global stretch on British resources. He wrote a minute to the Foreign Secretary, Bevin, and said, ‘You know, we have this; we have that; we have the other. We really cannot do all of this. In the Middle East’, he said, ‘the countries we are supposed to be supporting are weak militarily, industrially, strategically. They are vulnerable to communism. They are reactionary and they are run by a small class of wealthy and corrupt people. Really, we cannot put it right. We should be keeping out of this’.
He said – I am quoting here – ‘We are endeavouring to keep our influence over this coterie of weak, backward and reactionary states, who have to face the USSR, organised under an iron discipline’. He said, ‘It is a strategy of despair. We should be concentrating our resources elsewhere.’
Bevin was appalled by this, as you would imagine. He said: ‘The political arguments against your proposals are overwhelming. What you propose is a reversal of the whole policy I have been pursuing in the Middle East. It is true; those countries are weak, corrupt, etc, but if we evacuate the area, we make gift to Russia of the manpower of the region and the oil. It would be Munich all over again’. (You cannot stop Ministers doing that thing about Munich. I have spent 50 years trying to stop Ministers saying, ‘It is just like Munich’, and Ihave not got there.) ‘It would be Munich all over again, only on a world scale, with Greece, Turkey and Persia as the first victims, in place of Czechoslovakia. Also, the effect on our relations with the United States of America would be disastrous. After our abandonment of India and Burma, a retreat from the Middle East would appear to the world as the abdication of our position as a world power.’ Does anything sound familiar here?
This goes through from the end of the Second World War, really, and the threads are unmistakeable. There is the assumption that if we want to, we can just change the Prime Minister of a countryin the Middle East. We can just change the regime Of course, it is never as easy as that. If we think there should be a different one, we can do something about it. Our feeling is that the Americans will back us up. They hardly ever did on these kind of areas because they were looking at the interests of their own oil companies The dependence on the United States economically and militarily. The unreliability of the Americans offering us the unqualified support we always seemed to expect, even in a presidential election year, something we should always remember; and overplaying the communist threat. In Washington, we consider they are underplaying Arab nationalism.
Just to mention intelligence, since that is my thing, there is the same thing in Abadan. We havesomescandalsherelikeBurgess andMaclean,forexample. ThereareCIAcellsinTehran working actively against us. Butler could not spell it out, but he jolly well makes it clear, and it was a definite weakness in the British intelligence presence in the Middle East because our intelligence focus was on the Cold War fault lines. In 1956, we have Buster Crabb. What is more, Burgess and Maclean surface in Moscow and start making statements in 1956. There is a CIA cell in Cairo actively working against us with Nasser and, again, weak British intelligence.
I am nearly finished, Geoffrey, sorry. You have to read it to get the rest of it, but the continuities are striking. You can only conclude, if you are looking at Suez, that the lessons of Abadan were most certainly not learned, and indeed, the arguments were not thought through. Indeed, a lot of the officials working on the Middle East in 1950-51 are still in the region in different roles in 1956. For all that, much of Abadan happens under the Labour government – and it is the rump end of a definitely running out of steam Labour government, and Eden and Macmillan are very critical of the way it is handled, but of course, by the time Eden and Macmillan are in office they do exactly the same thing.
We all need lessons learned exercises. Governments are forever commissioning lessonslearned exercises. Exercises are all very well, but how should we be learning the lessons? I leave that thought with you. Thank you.
Thank you so much for that, Gill. Ali Ansari is Professor of Iranian History and the founding director of the Institute for Iranian Studies at the University of St Andrews, the UK’s number one university. He is a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) and was on secondment here in the FCDO as a knowledge exchange fellow from 2020 until earlier this year.
Thank you very much. Yes, it was 2020 to 2022, right in the middle of Covid, actually, which meant that my experience of the Foreign Office was somewhat distanced, but still extremely interesting. This report that, as Patrick has said, we had been discussing about when and how to bring out is a wonderful, detailed contribution to the history of British-Iranian relations in this period and a great addition to the corpus of material that we have. I know there are a number of Iranian historians who would like to see even more, but I have to say that, in this volume, you will get a lot of information, if you take the time to go through it in some detail.
I teach a course at St Andrews on Britain and Iran, and I always lay the emphasis on the fact that what we need to do is not to study Britain in Iran, but Britain and Iran, by which I mean that what we are really trying do is to look at the way in which the states and the peoples and the cultures related and interrelated with each other, cognisant of the context in which they found themselves. Gill was highlighting some very important aspects.
If you look at the Iranian historians who write on the whole crisis of oil nationalisation, the coup in 1950 and others, they tend to not see the detail and the granularity of what was going on in Britain at the time; and the context of the way in which Britain saw itself in terms of its policyin theMiddleEast andas avictorious powerin theSecondWorldWar,what it perceived to be its role afterwards and how it had to handle that.
One of the most interesting things for me coming out of the report, again, is what Gill has said. It is that trilateral relationship that emerges not simply between the British and the Iranians, but also between the British, the Americans and the Iranians. It is very interesting to see how, in actual fact, the Americans are often working against wider British interests, contraryto what the expectations of the British might be. Of course, as Gill says, the Americans have their own interests, but it is often quite difficult for me to convey that, even to my own students. In actual fact, I was at a conference earlier this summer with a couple of colleagues where we were conveying to some of my Iranian-American and American colleagues what the frictions werebetweenBritainandAmerica,eveninthepost-warperiod. Iwasverystruck,forinstance, that Lend-Lease was basically ended the day the war ended, much to the shock of the Attlee government, and despite the crisis that it put the British economy under at the time. I do not think Britain had anyillusions about what the Americans were goingto pursue in terms of their own interests. There was, in some senses – I hate to use the term, but I may use it now – the special relationship, but I do not think the special relationship was quite as special as people think it was, and many people coming from the Iranian perspective often do not see that.
I have titled my essay on this, which I have to say was very much an eye-opener for me in some ways while looking at some of the detail, that this was an unnecessary crisis. Why do I say that? One answer emerges from the detail of what is going on in terms of British
policymaking. Of course, the Butler report looks exclusively at the British aspect of things. One of the criticisms that comes out is that it is not taking into account the other side, but that is not the purpose of the Butler report. The Butler report, as an official history, is looking purely at British documents and the relationships there.
What it does give you is a degree of detail that you will not get in manyother histories in terms of the debates between the different ministers and the organisations and others, and the real differences of opinion that were emerging. Whereas, from an Iranian perspective, they tend to look at Britain in primary colours, and the government, the company, and so on and so forth as almost a single entity, if I can put it that way, the fact is that this report provides us with a very useful insight into the distinct developments that were competing with each other.
One of the things that comes across for me very clearly in this report is there is no love lost, I have to say, between the government and the company. That is very striking. When the government, and particularly the FO, as I suppose it would have been at the time, are looking at the relationship with the company itself, they think the company is extremely regressive in the way it is operating, and they say it quite explicitly
It is writtenin the report, andwe canseeit in other sources too, that theForeignOfficeopposed William Fraser’s appointment in 1941 because it did not think he was suitable. The argument was that Cadman, the previous director of the company, was a dictator, but a dictator who listened; Fraser was a dictator who did not listen to anyone, and that was just a fiasco. They said, ‘If you send him to Iran, it is going to be a recipe for disaster’, not least because the board that he appointed around himself did not have anyone who had any sort of area specialism or any understanding of the political environment in which they were about to operate. There were definitely frictions there, and you can see the agonies being expressed by ministers.
For me, the hero of this report, in a sense, is Ernie Bevin. Bevin makes a comment, which is quoted here, in 1946 that is so prescient about the problems that are about to emerge, really drawing that comparison with nationalisation in Britain at the time. He says, ‘We are a Labour government. We are doing all this nationalisation and so on and so forth. What in principle is wrongwiththemnationalisingandwantingabetterdealintermsofthecontract?’ Heisputting that out there. While I was reading this, it was interesting to me that this was in 1946. We are just coming out of the Azerbaijan crisis. In fact, we are probably still in the Azerbaijan crisis with the Soviet Union, but the fact is that what you are getting here is someone forward-facing and seeing what the problems there might be
Now, why is that not translated into practice? Part of it is that I think, at the time – but correct me if I am wrong – Bevin is ill. When we are getting to the actual crisis, some of the people who are most acutely aware of the problems taking place are not on the scene. You have our ‘little Pam’ [nickname of Viscount Palmerston, a famously assertive 19th-century Foreign Secretary] Herbert Morrison in charge rather than Ernest Bevin in terms of the Foreign Secretary. In that context, there is less of a flexibility in terms of how to deal with things, and that is something that comes across very strongly.
Regarding the company itself, as I said, you have to drag it almost kicking and screaming to the table by 1950 to arrange for a 50/50 arrangement, rather than the supplemental agreement that they put forward in 1949. Again, what is interesting in this is that the report has some fascinating detail, which I have tried to complement with some Persian sources in the article, about the role of Razmara in trying to get the 50/50 agreement through.
It is clearly indicated in this report, and Rohan Butler says, that Razmara’s assassination is, in many ways, and certainly from the British perspective, seen as a deliberate act of sabotage, if I can put it that way. Razmara had the 50/50 agreement in his pocket. He was not going to announce it for one reason or another. Yes, he made the speech on 3 March condemning nationalisation, but it is interesting that, in the Iranian Parliament at the time, nationalisation was not a done deal. It was not a done deal until very late in the day, and that is why part of my argument is about saying that, had the company moved quicker to address the issue of 50/50, we might have avoided this altogether.
Razmara is assassinated on 7 March. There is not an interregnum, in a sense, but there is a prime minister who comes in before Mosaddegh. Mosaddegh is finally asked as chairman of the Oil Commission. People actually think he is going to turn it down. He does not, and they say, ‘Well, since you have got us into this mess, you can get us out of it’, so off he goes, and he takes it. He takes the mantle on to nationalise the oil industry and move in. Once you get into that nationalisation,of course, then the dynamics change because, whereas previously you have an issue where the government can relate to the company and urge the company on, nationalisation becomes a direct threat to British interests, and therefore, you suddenly get that symbiosis in a sense. You suddenly get that synergy between the Foreign Office and the company, even though you can still see a degree of friction there.
The final argument I would have for the unnecessary crisis is one that comes out in Persian histories of the oil nationalisation crisis. There is a lot of interesting debate post-1979 on the oil nationalisation crisis, and it is often in rather obscure Persian histories that do not get to the mainstream and are only of interest to people like myself, Roham [Alvandi] and maybe Chris [de Bellaigue], to be honest. They are histories that are written by what we would not call ‘historians’ in a professional capacity because most decent historians in Iran today would not get a universityjob, so theyare all operatingas amateurs, but theywrite some prettyinteresting stuff, and they go through the sources pretty rigorously. They do not always, but it is better than nothing.
One of the things they do come out with, and one of the things theydo investigate, is what was going on around the death of Razmara and the assassination I think Mosaddegh also makes a very interesting statement in Parliament in November 1951. We are four or five months into the crisis, and he understands, in the public record, they are now into a crisis where two basic points of principle are conflicting with each other, and it is going to be quite difficult.
He says in there, ‘If only the 50/50 offer had been made earlier, we might not have been here’. To be fair, in his own comments, he says it should have been made years and years earlier. When I look at that, the implication is clear that there is a degree of flexibility here. If you go back to Bevin’s comments in 1946, you can see that, had there been a degree of greater – how should we say it – imagination, to use a term I always like to use in British foreign policy, at the time, and the ability to apply that imagination, it is certainly possible that this crisis could have been avoided. It has sadly scarred British-Iranian relations since then, in the popular imagination at least.
It is a hugely important text, and I hope scholars and others will look at it in some detail. It does give us a level of detail about the way in which British thinking was taking shape that otherwise we would not have, certainly not in one volume, so it is very useful in that sense. I can tell you that Ithink it is alreadybeingtranslated, as we speak, in Tehran, so it will probably be out. Someone had said it had already been sent, I think, so I suspect you will get it. What
I will look forward to in great interest is to see how they annotate that version because it will be quite interesting to see what they say. Anyway, thank you very much.
Sir Geoffrey Adams
Thank you verymuchindeed,Ali. That was great. Now,are we goingto hearthedisembodied voice of Jack Straw?
Patrick Salmon
Thank you, Jack. We are delighted that you can join us online, even though you cannot be with us in person. . . .
You have mentioned the Browne report, and I suppose you are one of the few people who has read both that report and the report we are launching on 8 December, in other words, the report by Rohan Butler. They are very different products, and they derive from different origins, but Iwonder if it is possible to compare the two and what lessons you might draw from them, partly about the British-Iranian relationship, but also about the way in which British policy towards Iran and more generally has been conducted.
Jack Straw, Former Foreign Secretary
Yes. Some say that Rohan Butler’s report is heavy going. I have to say that I did not find it heavy going, and in my book, I either said or meant to say that the Rohan Butler report should be required reading by people senior in the Office and by Foreign Secretaries. Indeed, it will never happen, but it would be a good idea to set an entrance exam to become a Foreign Secretary based on lessons from the Butler report.
They are verydifferent, and they are dealing with different things. One was dealing with what happened in the run-up to what we then came to call the Iranian Revolution and whythe Office was so blind to the possibility that the whole of the Shah’s regime could collapse. The second was to look in very great forensic detail at the extraordinary debacle of the humiliating withdrawal from Abadan in October 1951.
Of the two, Patrick, I would say that the more important of those two documents to read (although both are important) is Rohan Butler’s because the lack of coherent policymaking in London and Tehran in 1951 was, in my view, one of the main reasons why the debacle was as awful as it was. A key factor in that was Ernie Bevin’s illness, and somewhere in one of the commentaries, there is a reference to the fact that many ministers had been exhausted by their efforts since 1945. It is worth bearing in mind that the senior ministers in the 1945-51 Labour government had actually been toiling not for six years but for 11 years because they had been taken into the coalition government in 1940. That was a punishing period.
Ernie Bevin just got ill, and he was out of it. He retired and subsequently died very, very quickly. Attlee then appointed Herbert Morrison. In a biography written only a couple of years later, Attlee confessed that his appointment of Morrison was ‘his biggest mistake’, and it was. He was a disaster in two respects.
First of all, when the idea of nationalisation of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company was bubbling up in the mid and late 1940s, Herbert Morrison had other positions inside government. He was
Leader of the House and quite powerful on domestic policy. Ernie Bevin minuted his cabinet colleagues and said, ‘Hang on a second. How can we, the British Labour government, really complain about the fact that the Iranian government wants to nationalise the oil company that is being run from their territory, taking, as it were, their oil, when we have just nationalised the coal industry, the gas industry, the electricity industry and much else besides?’ Morrison’s riposte to that was, ‘Well, our nationalisations were different from the one that Mosaddegh was proposing’ – it is not entirely clear how – ‘and anyway, we needed the oil’, which was their real concern.
Once Morrison became Foreign Secretary, a job that he had coveted for years and years and years, he turned out to be, as I say, a complete disaster. On the one hand, as Mosaddegh was proposing that we needed to leave and we were indeed being forced to leave, he was proposing that we send gunboats to invade the southern part of Iran. As Rohan Butler said somewhere, he was ready to will the end, but afraid to will the means, and in the end, in an operation appropriately called Operation Midget, all we did with the frigates that were off Abadan was evacuate the British staff who could not get out any other way.
The other reallyinteresting echo for me, having been involved in Iraq, was that there was a big row going on in London about the legality of military action, but in a world slightly turned upside down, compared with 2003, when [in 1951] it was the Attorney General who was saying, ‘There is no way you can simply invade Iran because you do not like the fact that they are nationalising your oil company. The most you can do in international law is to take the staff off and evacuate those people’. Meanwhile, there was a Deputy Legal Adviser in the Office who was saying, ‘Oh no, it is absolutely fine. Be as belligerent as you like’. As I say, the reversal of roles is a very interesting parallel with 2003.
Patrick Salmon
Thank you, Jack. We had better stop there but this was a fascinating interview.
Sir Geoffrey Adams
That was fantastic. Now, this is the moment when we open it up to the floor, as it were. We have about an hour for discussion and comment on the publication but also everything we have heard so far. In doing so, Ispeak not as a historian but as a practitioner or a recent practitioner, and so some of the themes that I had in my mind this afternoon, but also reading the book, seem to me to underline what we have all been talking about, which is the tremendous relevance of this work to current events and current issues.
The things I noted were Britain’s place in the world, and specifically in the Middle East, as things changed, to put things neutrally. How Britain, and specificallyhow Whitehall, responds to crises is a subject that is pretty topical again. It is extensively covered in these documents but extensivelythought about currentlyin Whitehall. The role of the FCDO in relation to other government departments with an interest in foreign policy issues is a theme of these papers and seems to be highly topical all the time. Finally, and perhaps most uncomfortably, there is the question of the quality of British diplomacy and British diplomats. Now, this is a subject that, being British, we find rather embarrassing and tiptoe around. Gill referred to that in her remarks just now, but it was under discussion then, and it is perhaps in the back of our minds now.
Anyway, those are some of the things that you might want to comment on, or many others. Who would like to kick off? I do not know whether you have a planted question, Patrick, to get things going.
Christopher de Bellaigue
As a historian who has written about Mosaddegh, I am grateful for a reminder that the events that we, as historians, regard as the climax to the story – in Mosaddegh’s case, his defenestration of power and his tragic, low, long death in exile – are actually not inevitable. They were not graven in stone, and the idea that this crisis was avoidable is hugely valuable and important.
There are two points that I would add to Ali’s summary of events. The first is that, at the same time as the company was scrambling to achieve the level of generosity that the Iranians had demanded five years earlier or 10 years earlier, and then arriving at that point 10 years too late, other oil companies were also active, particularly in Saudi Arabia, but also in Iraq. The Iraqi company was in fact a subsidiary of Anglo-Persian and they were offering better terms, so this was very much a commercial race as well. Each time someone else got better terms, AngloIranian would be called to at least meet those terms.
The second thing is something that Gill said, and I do not know whether she has thoughts on this. Being reminded once more of the relationship between the company and the Office and how that complicated events, but then hearing from you that Suez reprised so much, despite Suez seeming to me to be much more a purely geopolitical and strategic disaster, I would like to see whether you discerned differences in the two crises because of that very obvious commercial element that was present at Abadan that was perhaps less so in Suez. Obviously, there is the canal, but there was not a company that was breathing down the neck of the diplomats and the politicians.
Sir Geoffrey Adams
Thank you very much, Christopher. Do you want to answer that question or is there someone else itching to come in?
Gill Bennett
I will just say briefly that, obviously, there are differences, but there are also very strong continuities in the sense that it is oil. Right from the beginning of 1956, even before the Egyptian nationalisation of the Suez Canal Company, there was the fear in British ministries that Nasser would do something to prevent the flow of oil, not so much by nationalising the canal but by his influence over other Arab states, and indeed what he might do to the Gulf States.
The element that is really key in this is this question of the American involvement. Now, you are quite right about Iraq and so on and, indeed, to be fair to the Americans, just for a moment, early in the Abadan crisis, they did warn us. They said, ‘Look, we are just signing this 50/50 dealwithAramco. Youmayneedtodosomethingsimilar’,andthatbrings intoplaysomething which very much comes out in Butler’s report and is also evident in the Suez crisis.
It is firstly a resentment that, in a region where we consider ourselves to be pre-eminent, the Americans are trying to tell us what we should do when, really, they should be deferring to us. One of the documents I am going to put in the volume that I was talking about is a document written on 2 January 1956, which is essentially setting out British policy in the region and it starts, ‘Well, of course, Britain has a pre-eminent position in the region, and it is because the
Arab states look to us. They know we are strong militarily.’ We do not even mention the Americans, but the Americans are much stronger than us, and there is a sort of resentment. Allied to that is what Ali was talking about, which is the way the company behaved and its refusal to even contemplate making certain steps that, even in the Foreign Office, it was thought that it could take, like appointing a couple of Iranian directors to the board of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company or giving more profits. When you see the scale of the profits the company was getting and then you see what they were getting in Iran, you realise that the Iranians are not stupid. They could see that, and it could have been done, but it was thought of as being not their place. The company said they were in there for commercial reasons. This is the final crucial point. There are a lot of arguments in the Foreign Office about what influence we could exert over the company. We have two British board members on the company, and they are government-appointed board members. We never ask them to do anything about this We do not seem to think that we can, and nobody seems to be able to work out whether it gives us anyleverage or not. All these are real failures, which are different from 1956, I grant you, but the assumptions, both of the British and the Americans, are the same.
Thank you, Gill. That is reallyhelpful. When I was listing the themes from this afternoon that I think are extremely relevant today, of course I should have mentioned the issue of the reliabilityor otherwise of the US as an allyand the specialness or otherwise of the relationship.
Thank you very much. I am pleased that the conversation has taken that turn because, to me, this is one of the most interesting things about it. I have not read the report. I will do, and I do not pretend to be an expert on what happened then, but this relationship between the company and the government, or between government and industry, at a time when government has spent the Second World War running a lot of industry, at least de facto, and has then just nationalised so much of it after the war is one of the most interesting things to me. This is particularly so in light of the question of what the board members do and how much the Foreign Office feels it can influence the company.
I have a natural bias to this because, as well as being formerly an ambassador to Iran, I have worked for two natural resources companies, one oil company and now a mining company. Seeing the geopolitical interaction between governments, particularly when it comes to the nature of the deals that are done on resources and how they change over time, it is interesting to think how it must have been obvious at the time that the deal that the company had with Iran was not sustainable and was going to lead to problems. The intriguing ‘might have been’ that is always there with history, that tantalising ‘what would have happened’, is what would have happened, as Ali says, if Fraser had not been the chairman of the company and someone else had been running it.
I look forward to reading it just to dig into that, but it is one of the more interesting aspects of that. It also quite difficult nowadays to think ourselves back into a world in which government actually understood industry, which it does not really now because of its involvement in it. Thank you.
Thank you very much. That was Rob Macaire, since he forgot to say who he was.
Tim Dowse
I have a couple of questions, primarily for Gill. I have not read the report, but, Gill, I have read your essay, and in reading it and the comparison you make between Abadan and Suez, I get the impression that you think that Attlee, in his approach to Abadan, putting it in a much broader strategic context, was fundamentally more realistic in his approach than Eden was at Suez, and in fact, if Attlee had followed the sort of example that Eden followed at Suez, that we could have had a Suez five years earlier if we had tried to take military action. That was one question.
The other question concerns a reference to the very limited Whitehall coordination towards the crisis Was it ever discussed in Cabinet meetings? Was the lack of coordination between officials also reflected at the ministerial level?
Sir Geoffrey Adams
Thank you very much, Tim. Do you want to answer those rather specific questions?
Gill Bennett
Yes. Attlee was more realistic, and of course, that is preciselywhat, in some sense, Butler does argue, but it does not address Bevin’s objection, ‘Does this mean that you would then be opening the field for the Russians to come in?’ which of course they were threatening to do. Whether they would really have gone into North Persia is unclear, but they had not long been pushed out of Persia. Would it mean that the Americans would think it was dreadful if we drew back? Well, I am not so sure they would because they were all too ready to step into the breach. Yes, Attlee takes a more realistic view, and of course what he says when Morrison is chuntering about using force is, ‘Do we want to use force? Is it realistic?’
The other thing you have to remember is the Korean War. We had had to scratch around to send a brigade to Korea. We did not have troops lying around that we could just send. In fact, the difficulties of operating militarily are another link with Suez. It is all very well talking big, butactually, you cannotdoit. Physically, youdonothavethewherewithalmilitarilytoenforce your will.
Regarding coordination, yes, and one of the big things that Strang argues in his commentary is the poor level of coordination and he praises Eden. He says, ‘Well, when Eden becomes Foreign Secretary right at the end of the crisis, at least we then get somebody who knows what he is doing’, but really, what Eden does is appoint a ministerial-level committee to deal with it, whereas previously there had been an official committee. More importantly, there had been a committee about oil, but that was with the Ministry of Fuel and Power and the Treasury, and it was at a certain technical level, and it never really percolated upward to ministers, or, if it did, ministers did not really get it. That definitely is a problem, and it is one of the problems identified in quite a dignified way by Butler and in a much less dignified way by Strang.
Thank you very much, Gill. Ali, you wanted to add a word.
Ali AnsariI just wanted to come back on a couple of things that Chris said. In a sense, what I want to get away from is not to treat the company’s approach to these things as completely bizarre and inane. We know in retrospect that the company’s approach was wrong, but what is interesting in the document, as you can see quite clearly, is how it came to the conclusions it did. This is
what is interesting about it in terms of the commercial relationship. What was fundamentally wrong, which is maybe a lesson learned, in a sense, is that the company approaches it as a commercial and legal matter, and says, ‘We are there by treaty, and that is it’, whereas what others are saying is, ‘No, this is a political problem and you have to deal with the politics of it’, and that is what they are not getting.
In some ways, they constantly say, ‘What is the point of a 50/50 arrangement? If the company loses money, the Iranians will get nothing, but the deal that we are giving them will guarantee them annual income, so itis amuchbetterdeal’. However,thatis not thepoint from theIranian perspective and, as you say, given what is going on in the rest of the region and the rest of the world. That is a critical factor. It is quite important also to see the details of the way in which the company approaches things, not least also the fact that it says, ‘The company is much bigger than Abadan, so what are we planning to nationalise here? What are we planning to hand over? What is going on and what profits and other things are we going to be sharing?’
The other side, of course, that we do not see, which is away from the commercial, is simply thewaythat thecompanytreats its employees. This is quiteinteresting. Averygoodcolleague of ours, Touraj Atabaki, has worked on the social and labour conditions in Abadan, and it is fascinating to see that the Labour government sends inspectors to Abadan to see the working conditions. Of course, Bevin relates to this in his account. He says that workers’ social conditions are appalling. It is just not good. What the company does, of course, is that it says, ‘Whenever there is a disturbance, it is the communists. They are agitating’. The government says, ‘No, the workers’ conditions are appalling. You need to do something about this’. What is interesting is that the company then says, ‘The conditions are better than what Iranian labourers would have’, and the irony, of course, is that they go to an Iranian employer who says, ‘Yes. Frankly, they do not need any better conditions than this, otherwise they will get cheeky and ask for wage rises and this sort of thing’, so it is a collective failure in that sense, but one in which what Bevin and others are saying is that the company should be taking the lead, and this is a crucial point. Do not go to the lowest common denominator in terms of your social welfare. Do something that leads the way.
In a curious way, the company is the first major industrial plant in Iran, with all the consequences that that relates to. It is a vast industrial endeavour. There are all sorts of things that could have been done by the company but which, unfortunately, it did not do. That is a great pity. It caused the segregation that occurred and this sort of thing, which, again, for the Labour government in power at the time, was all a disaster. You cannot continue like this.
What I find interesting, which is something that comes out in the text and was mentioned by Gill, is the fact that, from the Iranian perspective, the company is a state company because the British government has the golden share. However, the golden share did not give the British government the right to say anything other than, ‘You are not allowed to sell it to a foreign power’. There was an agreement apparently signed that goes into Parliament that they all adhered to by some sort of strange convention, as far as I can see. They basically say, ‘We cannot interfere in the commercial running of the company’, whereas, from the company’s perspective, hiding behind the government was a godsend. If anything went wrong, they said, ‘The government will not let us’.
The reality of it is that the government had very little room for manoeuvre in telling the company what to do, which I can only put down to the fact that it was a convention that came when Churchill bought the golden share in 1914. It was a confidential letter or something that was written that got the agreement passed through Parliament, which said that the government would not interfere in the day-to-day running of the company. From the company’s
perspective, it could have its cake and eat it, effectively. It did not have to take the blame, but there was a limit. It is a strange dynamic, I have to say, and not quite as simple as some on the Iranian side like to see. It is a bit more complicated, but in some ways self-inflicted, I have to say.
Gill BennettCan I just add very briefly that it is in total contrast to Washington, where the oil executives are in and out of Congress and in and out of politicians’ offices all the time? That is just not happening here.
Jonathan BoffMy name is Jonathan Boff. I am a historian from the University of Birmingham. I am a historian of the World Wars. What is really interesting to me about this discussion so far is the shift that has taken place already between 1945 and 1950-1951, whereby these national champion companies are not only national levers of power during wartime, but also national interests. By 1950, it is just a national interest, no longer a national lever of power.
I am thinking particularlyof things like the sanctions regimes against Russia over Ukraine, and the difficulty, in many cases, of imposing sanctions regimes through multinational companies, where BP, for instance, is as diverse a company, I suspect, as the United Nations these days. The idea that we could use it as a national lever of power in that kind of sense is for the birds, I imagine.
My question to this room, given the expertise here, is whether that has made diplomacy harder or simpler, because we do not have to worry about the national interests of these companies as we maybe had to in the past.
Picking up on something that Geoffrey mentioned earlier, what impact have the previous volumes in this series had on the Foreign Office, and what impact would you like this volume to have on the Foreign Office? I should say that I am a former diplomat myself.
Louise Kettle
I am Louise Kettle, an academic from the Universityof Nottingham. It ties in exactlywith this question, which is why I thought I would put my hand straight up. It picks up on something that Gill ended on, which was the lesson-learning process. We all know that it is easier to identify lessons than it is to implement them. Clearly, this was intended to identify lessons, so I am interested in what happened with it at the time. What influence did this document have? In 1962, it was clearly too late for 1956, and it is a weighty document. As I confessed to Gill, I had ordered it at the National Archives and, when it arrived, I sent it back because I thought, ‘I am never going to get through this in a day’. What happened to it at the time? Could you let me know a little bit more about what kind of influence it had?
Sir
Gill, you touched on this earlier when you talked about the creation of Policy Planning staff, so do you want to just expand on that, because it is an important theme?
The creation of Policy Planners is the most tangible outcome, but it also contributed to a level of debate in the Office, certainly amongst representatives overseas, because one of the things that they argue after Strang’s commentaryis sent to them, is, ‘We ought to do diplomacy more like the French, because the French just do what they want and do not care what anybody thinks. We ought to be more like that. We should not always be worrying about what other people say’. Now, of course, it is not quite as simple as that, but although there is always a limited impact from a historical study like this, it did produce considerable discussion.
Especially with a major, big tome like that, it is hard to measure any impact in that way. As I say, we are here as FCDO Historians. Probably our more immediate day-to-day impact is on short bits of advice. We get asked for four bullet points to go into a briefing note tomorrow. That is what I have been doing this year on Ukraine, and maybe that impacted just as much. I do not know, but it is hard when you have a major piece of work like that, especially when it was not published at the time, to have an impact, but Ido think the organisational changes were significant.
If I can just add a comment on that, in my 42 years in this job, I was involved on more than oneoccasion–threeorfourtimes–inanexerciseentitled Should We be More Like the French? Other colleagues in the room may recall that. It is a perennial theme. It comes around every few years in this building. I was amused to discover, when I was working over there, that, in the Quai d’Orsay in Paris, they do exercises every few years entitled Should We be More Like the Brits?
In addition to what Gill said, there was and has been a subliminal, osmotic influence. The creation of Policy Planning Staff and its various successors was a very specific organisational point, but certainly what I and people like me used to take from exercises like this, and the folk memory of them, was the importance of regional studies, deep expertise and language expertise. This is where there is a massive read-across to the Nick Browne report on Iran. Again, looking around some of the people in this room who have been involved in that, that is what we thought.
We thought that we should be better diplomats, frankly, and that we should know more about the countries in which we were stationed and give more honest advice to ministers. The last of those, of course, is easier said than done. That is a little comment, but other colleagues involved in this over the years might like to add to that.
Gordon BarrassI am Gordon Barrass, ex-PolicyPlanning, former Chief of the Assessments Staff, and teaching strategyat LSE, where Ihave worked with Geoffreyand with Ali. When westarted this course at LSE, the Foreign Office asked me to consult the foreign diplomats who were on the course about what they thought about British diplomacy. One evening, over several bottles of wine, talking about many things, and then, ‘By the way, what do you think of British diplomacy?’ the answer was very simple: ‘You talk too much. You spend your time trying to tell us why we should agree with you, rather than trying to find out how we look at things and seeing if there is any common ground.’
This links into another important question, which is the mind of others, and this is where some work has been started in Whitehall on net assessment. This links back to Andrew Marshall, who was the director of net assessment in the office of the Secretary of Defense in the
Pentagon. He spent a lot of time wanting to know how other people thought about things, because he said, ‘The Soviet Union does not think about things. You have to understand the structure of the Soviet Union and what different parts of it think, and their own interests. Even more important, you should not only observe very carefully what they do, but why they do it, because it is only when you can answer that question that you begin to see ways forward.’
There are some lessons that are percolating around Whitehall now that will facilitate some of these things, but picking up the points that you have all made, it is really to sit down and keep on asking yourself, ‘Why? What is it that we are not thinking about?’ It is all too easy to think that we know what we are thinking about, but that is not often the case.
Alexander Evans
I am Alexander Evans, from the LSE, but frequently of this building when I am not out. I just have a question for Gill, if I may, which is gazing forward. I am not an Iran or Middle East hand, but, if a group of historians gathered in 20 years’ time to look at crises recent of British foreign policy, are you confident that theywould be in a better positionto reconstruct decisionmaking or a worse position, given, in a sense, what is now recorded in the archives and, in particular, the prevalence of government by WhatsApp, as it were, rather than necessarily by annotated submission?
Gill Bennett
Well, that is an easy one. It is a problem, as you well know, and I do think that historians of the future are really going to struggle to reconstruct the path of policymaking in the same way that we have been able to do with a paper record. Diplomacy by WhatsApp is clearly impenetrable and difficult to record.
Another aspect, though, relates to what Jonathan said in his question, which is this question of everything now being multinational, as it were. That is part of it. Almost everything that other countries are involved in now involves so many other players that, unless you have a formal body – like the UN, for example, although that has a limited remit, if you see what I mean – it is very difficult for a historian 20 years on to look back and say, ‘Where were these decisions taken, and by whom? What were they thinking of at the time?’ If you do not have a good record, it is going to be even more difficult. This is a problem that people have been thinking about for a long time, but they have not solved it yet.
Iam AntonyWynn, chairmanofthe IranSociety,ofwhichAli is acommitteemember. Taking up your point about how the other side thinks, I thought I would take this opportunity to read you a little bit of an article I wrote a few years ago about How the Qor’an Led to the Downfall of Mosaddegh, if you will indulge me. The story concerns one Kazem Hassibi and how the negotiations between the Iranian government and the Anglo-Iranians broke down.
Hassibi was a religious man and the son of a prominent bazaar merchant who had been sent to France by Reza Shah to undertake a seven-year course of the École Polytechnique, where he read physics and geophysics. So religiously observant was Hassibi that, distressed by insufficient Frenchplumbingarrangements, healways carriedhis aftabeh, whichis aewerwith a long spout that you fill with water to do your private ablutions with. He carried one of those in the tail pocket of his polytechnicien’s uniform, so that he could perform his ablutions in the proper Islamic manner.
He was a brilliant mathematician, a technocrat and a solver of engineering problems, but he was socially inept. He said of himself that he was not a man of action and that he could not run things. Nevertheless, by the time of the oil nationalisation, he had become an adviser to Mossadegh on technical matters, calculating, for example, projection of oil revenues and the surpluses that should be available for distribution to the people. He was the only person who had the mathematical ability to do this.
After the expulsion of the British from the oilfields, and the very effective boycott of Iranian oil, theeconomywas onthepoint ofcollapse. Without revenue,the governmentcould produce budgets for only one month at a time, and it was driven to borrowing money from the people, even students, who were asked to buy bonds at 10 tomans a head, which is nothing.
Mossadegh was heard to say at the time that he could not solve the problem with the British that hehad created, for, if he wereto cometo anysortof adeal with them,his supporters would accuse him of treason. He had painted himself into a corner. At this point, to break the deadlock,theWorldBank intervenedwith aproposal that theyshould takeovertheoil industry in escrow and run it on Iran’s behalf for two years, during which time the Iranian government could thrash out a new agreement with the Anglo-Iranian. The oil would then be handed back to the Iranian government under new, mutually acceptable terms. This eminently sensible offer of a way out was Mossadegh’s last chance, and he knew it. He asked a team of his advisers to examine the proposal and report back to him. Hassibi was on that team. Now, this is where it gets interesting. For two nights previously, Hassibi had been seeing dreams of brightly coloured birds coming up to him and flying away again. In the Habname, which is the Shia book of interpretation of dreams, these pretty but dangerous birds mislead people byfascination and siren-like enticement. Seeing them in a dream is to be given a warning of being lured down a wrong path.
Onthethirdday,Mossadegh sent for Hassibi, gave him thethinfilecontainingthe WorldBank proposal, and asked him to report back on it. Mindful of the worrying portent of his dreams, without looking at the file, Hassibi took it and said that he would need to consult a member of the oil company’s board. In the morning, he went with the file to the house of his friend Barhideh[?], the president of the sales commission of the oil company. He was also a religious man and had just come back from the public bath.
Inside the house, they looked at the file for the first time, but hardly dared read it. Intimidated by the momentous nature of the matter and incapable of coming to a decision for which they knew they would be held to account, they decided to resolve the question by falling back on Estekhareh, which is the opening of the Qur’an and seeing where your finger falls. This is the Persian practice of turning to the poems of Havez or to the Qur’an for help in coming to a difficult decision.
Now, the Shia versions of the Qur’an have notes in the margin with ‘good’ or ‘bad’, according to the passage. They turned up the Qur’an Barhideh put his finger down and passed it to Hassibi to open it. Hassibi said no. Barhideh had just come back from the hammam. He was in a state of ritual purity. He, therefore, should open the sacred book and pass the book back to him. The passage that fell open was indicated as bad. Hassibi shook his head. ‘Oh dear, once more, the British want to cheat us’.
He took the file back to Mossadegh and told him that the World Bank proposal was not acceptable. He had not even read it. Mossadegh, acting on the advice from his expert advisor, rejected the proposal and, within the month, he was removed. That is just part of the story, but it does show you how the other side work.
Can Iask you a question, Geoffrey? It draws on something that Ali said, which is this question of the differentiation from an Iranian viewpoint between Britain and America, and how we have tended to be conflated as great and little Satan, even when we have been rather at odds. In your own experience of working in the country, I wonder if you could say a little more. As we know, memories are very long, but if you could comment on that a bit.
Sir Geoffrey AdamsI will try it, but Rob and others perhaps have some more recent experience of this. In my dealings with the Iranian government in the three years I was there, there was an unspoken assumption that I was reporting all my conversations to the United States, but not that I was an agent of the United States. There was quite a sophisticated understanding, certainly amongst the Iranian officials who we were dealing with, about the nature of our relationship with the US. They understood in particular the special relationship, the Five Eyes relationship and the intelligence relationship between us and the Americans, and they knew that we would exchange assessments and intelligence in a very intense way. They made a contrast between that, which is intelligence and analysis, as it were, and policymaking, and they understood the difference between the two things.
On policy, they knew that there were nuances. For example, on the nuclear issue, which has been an elephant in the room all afternoon that we have not talked about at all, recent people have been involved in that very intensively. On the nuclear issue, they understood pretty well that we and the Americans were often in different places, but they, quite rightly, saw that as an opportunity for us, because they saw us as an avenue of influence on the Americans.
A final point is that although every British representative in Tehran carries this enormous baggage of history, and the American baggage is quite different, the Iranians were, nevertheless, under no illusions, to come back to a point you made earlier, Gill, about the relative power of great Satan and little Satan. They thought that the British were cunning, devious and quite well-informed about Iran, and we had the historical baggage, but they knew perfectly well that the US was the big cheese. I sometimes felt a little bit patronised by Iranian officials who said, ‘Well, it is nice chatting to you, but now we need to have a conversation with the big guys’.
Those were some of my reflections, but I would love to hear from Rob or others. Ali wants to come in first.
Ali AnsariIt is quite interesting how that narrative about the great and little Satan is something that originated in the United States. This is the thing: where they want to take responsibility for something, on the other hand it is not in their political interests to take political responsibility for it, whereas it is much more of a joint endeavour, but one that could not have been done because ofthe fact that it was theAmerican embassyat thetime,whichwas extant. TheBritish embassy did not have that capacity there at the time.
That is an interesting narrative, I have to say. As you know, Geoffrey, there are, sadly, a whole raft of Iranians who will be quite clear that the power behind the throne is the British. The Americans are big and butch and throw a lot of money around and are powerful, but the wily fox is still around. I was interested to see that, apparently, they found a fox in the embassy compound last week, but not in a Union Jack waistcoat, I am pleased to say.
Sir Geoffrey Adams
Was it Macmillanwhosaid thatweare Athens toAmerica’sRome? Iam not sure. Rob, would you like to add or subtract from what I was saying?
Robert Macaire
Just very briefly, because Gill’s question is really interesting for those of us who have served in Tehran, the extraordinary absence of the Americans is just fascinating as a diplomat. It was so unique to be there. I was there when Trump was president, and that really blew the minds of a lot of Iranian interlocutors. It was very difficult for them to believe that there was genuinely a difference of policy and that, when the sanctions were reimposed in 2018, we genuinely disagreed and, indeed, were encouraging British companies, as other European colleagues were, to continue to trade with Iran in defiance of American sanctions because we wanted the JCPOA to survive.
Our sophisticated interlocutors in the foreign ministry just about understood and accepted that, but, even for them, at the back of their minds, they thought, ‘There is a conspiracy here somewhere.’ It was very difficult for them not to believe that there was a UK-US conspiracy going on and that this was all carefully cooked up, with good cop/bad cop going on.
Certainly for the hardliners in the parliament and the regime, and the senior clerics, they were convinced that this was all just a stitch-up. That is reallyinteresting, because our policies were diametrically opposite. It just blew a lot of circuits in Tehran.
Sir Geoffrey Adams
Yes, that rings a very loud bell.
Patrick Holdich
I am Patrick Holdich. Until recently, I was head of Research Analysts here in Foreign Office and am onlya few months out, so Imight be careful in how I put it. The whole lessons-learned issue keeps coming back. For Research Analysts, it is something that is very much one of the elements of providing institutional memory.
I was aware of the Butler history, but I had not realised that it was 300,000 words and took three years to produce. There is a slight danger, with the Chilcot inquiry being the obvious mega inquiry, that it sets a standard or a bar that is very hard for subsequent ones to meet. The Chilcot inquiry was a million words and took 10 years to produce. If we are going to meet that level, there are going to be no more inquiries. People just are not going to take them on.
If we think about the ones that are hanging there and have not been started, Afghanistan and Syria are obvious ones that require verygood analysis. As Research Analysts, we can do some of that in house, but you cannot do all of it. Although these are fantastic historical pieces, they are not so operationally useful. You can do a short-term, fairly rapid look at a lesson learned and then make sure that somebody remembers to go back and say, ‘Look, 10 or 15 years ago, we looked it and this is what happened’. That is my thought.
Just on WhatsApp very quickly, sitting beside Alexander [Evans], we have to be realistic that WhatsApp is here to stay – or until somebody else buys it, I guess. I found them quite useful working on them with the desks and then going back. It is quite a reliable record there, if somebody manages to transfer the file and put it on to Word. It is not a bad record. I have used that a few times myself. I did not know at the time whether I was breaking the rules in
doing that. I was not entirely sure, but it is done and it is there. It is one way of trying to record decision-making, particularly in very rapid cases.
Lord (David) Hannay
You rather tempted me to think again, particularly given the direction in which the discussion has moved in the last few questions. I can only contribute the following, which comes from 1960, about nine years after the events being discussed here, but not that long after.
To give you an anecdote, I was a Persian language student. I was studying in Mashhad. My teacher was very good. He was a schoolteacher as well, but he spent a lot of our lessons telling me and asking me to make sure that Britain set Iran to straights in a better route than it was, and make the region better, and so on. After about three goes around this course, I said to him, ‘I do not think you quite realise that Britain is not quite the power it was in this part of the world, and we do not have it within our power to do what you are asking. The Americans are much bigger players’. He sat back with a smile of supreme satisfaction and said, ‘Yes, but we Iranians know who controls the Americans’.
Roham Alvandi
My name is Roham Alvandi and I am also from the LSE. I very much welcome the release of this report. We are, here in the UK, it is safe to say, far behind our American friends in terms of releasing documents to do with policy towards Iran during the Mossadegh period.
The argument is often made that the danger of officially acknowledging Britain’s role in the overthrow of Mossadegh or releasing intelligence files would be damaging to Britain’s relations with Iran. That was certainly the argument that was made when the nuclear negotiations were going on, and similar arguments were made in Washington. John Kerry, for example, when he was Secretary of State, blocked the release of the Foreign Relations of the United States volume on Iran that was not released until the Trump administration, who had no such concerns.
That volume was released, and nothing happened. The sky did not fall down. There were no Iranians with pitchforks in the streets and, in fact, it had the opposite effect, in a way, because it took the mysteryout of 1953 – the idea that there are these great secrets being kept back, and there will be these huge revelations. In fact, when we saw the American volume, it pretty much confirmed everything we already knew. It added a little bit of interesting detail, but it was not really that earth-shattering.
Perhaps the time has come for us to do the same. Perhaps we can also shed some light in these dark corners of our history and, in a way, take the venom out of it and relegate it to history, where it belongs.
Sir Geoffrey Adams
You make the argument veryeloquently. I am sure that the current Chief Historian is listening carefully. Would the panel like to respond to anything?
Ali Ansari
I have responded so many times to Roham that I am not going to respond to him again in public, but Gill might want to respond. All I can say is that there is a huge amount of material in this document that you do have to look at. One can read between the lines also. I do not think that there is much that we do not know, to be honest. That is true, but there are other policy decisions and political decisions related to other things.
In terms of what Alexander said, the question of archives and historians is very interesting. A colleague of mine in St Andrews is currently writing a book on the demolition of archives. He is calling it The New Dark Ages, and it is very interesting. He is looking at the destruction of a lot of archives in war, essentially. In the Great War and in the Second World War, some really quite astonishing archives are lost in Italy and other places. I had no idea.
The other thing, which has been mentioned, is that, in the last 20 years, many government departments are going to be quite problematic for historians 20 years hence and very difficult to piece these things together. I do think that it is a problem and concur entirely with the sentiment that you were expressing there. I know that it was a question, but I think I know where you are coming from. Everyone knows that it is an issue, but I, for the life of me, do not know why no one will do anything about it. From a historian’s point of view, it is going to be catastrophic. It really is. For us generally in Whitehall but also in policymaking, it is going to be extremely difficult, because institutional memory is being lost.
Sir Geoffrey Adams
That is true. When I was, until recently, Head of Mission, I carried on sending telegrams from my post, even though they were increasingly unfashionable and rather laughed at. I felt that one of the main reasons for doing that was to show that there was some record of what I had been up to. Patrick, you will know about it, but you press a button and diptels, as they are now called, or diplomatic telegrams, are automatically archived. I was really worried that, in 30 or 40 years’ time, our successors sitting in this room would say, ‘Cairo was completely silent for three years. What on earth were theydoing?’ for example, and so Iwas keen that at least some evidenceofactivityorsomesignof lifeshouldappear. Iwas reallyworried. Peoplearerightly sceptical about policy by WhatsApp.
In my experience, there were some quite serious and respectable policy discussions, but they were done by email. Issues were thrashed out and views were taken. Email is quite effective as a way of consulting people quickly, and better than the old-fashioned telegrams, but they are not kept. I was worried that they were not being kept.
For example,when emails issuefrom the Foreign Secretary’sPrivate Officenow –ordid when I was there a year or two ago – they say at the bottom, ‘It is not our responsibility to keep this email. It is your responsibility’. How many of the hard-worked desk officers upstairs were doing that by printing off a copy, putting it on a file or recording it somewhere on their computers to ensure that the Foreign Secretary’s decisions on foreign policy, which are the quintessence or the summit, if you like, of policymaking, were properly recorded? I really used to worry about that, and I still worry about it, as you can tell. I think we should give the last word to Gill.
Gill BennettTherearepeoplethinking about theseissues, clearly. At TheNational Archives as well,people do a lot of work on this. One of the big problems is that a lot of work is being done to retain and keep information, which is a good thing. Its retrieval is a much bigger problem, but we will not go into that now.
On the openness front, I would just like to say that one of the things that Butler complained about in the report was that he was not allowed to see some papers. It is not entirely clear. It was probably what we would now call PUSD papers – i.e. intelligence-related papers from the interface between the Foreign Office and the intelligence agencies, and possibly also some of what we would now call ‘Private Office papers’ .
As historians, we have made huge strides on this over the years. Indeed, Jack Straw is a great pioneer. He was absolutely (a) for our being able to see anything we want, and (b) willing to have things reviewed for release, if you possibly could. Today, when Historians do a piece of work, we have access to whatever we want to have access to. That does not mean that you can publish it. That is a different issue, but you can see it, and so anything that you write can be informed by a much wider range of documentation than Butler would have found. That is why some of his remarks about intelligence and so on are very elliptical in the report, because they had to be.
I do think that we have made a lot of strides forward, which is a good thing. I would like to finish on a positive note, Geoffrey.
Sir Geoffrey Adams
It is absolutely right that we should end on that encouraging note. I am looking at Patrick to see whether he has anything to say except, ‘Join us for a drink’. There will be an intermission of maybe 10 or 15 minutes, and then there will be drinks in the room next door in honour of Gill. Thank you all very much indeed.
