Background to the Butler Report

Gill Bennett

Former Chief Historian, FCDO

I. Commissioning and Publication of the Report

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.

II. Response to the Report

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.

III. Discussions Preceding the Crisis

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?

IV. Parallels with the Suez Crisis

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.

Sir Geoffrey Adams

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.