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The Masquerade 349

he should negotiate with the Persian government over the oil companies’ joint
approach to OPEC: his task was simply to impress upon the governments of
Persia, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait that the United States wholly supported the
companies in their combined stand against the ratchet tactics of OPEC over oil
prices. Instead of confining himself to this object in his exchanges with the shah
and his ministers, he elected to dwell - as his own testimony revealed three
years later - upon the injurious effects which any interference with oil supplies

would have upon the Western industrial nations.
Apart from the arguments put to him by Muhammad Reza Shah and
Amuzegar, what other considerations may have persuaded Irwin to alter the
purpose of his mission? By his own admission, it seems that he was not very
well informed about the Middle East or about the oil industry. Nor does he
appear to have grasped precisely and thoroughly what was at stake in the

impending confrontation with OPEC. (In his recollections before the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, for instance, he categorized the oil companies’
decision to negotiate with OPEC en bloc, a decision which was the very
foundation stone of the whole strategy to checkmate OPEC, as a ‘procedural
issue’.) It is difficult to resist the conclusion that Irwin was unduly swayed,
especially in his judgement of the urgency of the situation, by the views of
others at Tehran - MacArthur in particular. MacArthur was in no doubt

that the oil companies should, in their own interest and that of the Western
industrial nations, concede the Persians’ desire for separate negotiations with
the Gulf oil states. He strongly impressed this opinion upon the State Depart­
ment. Why he should have taken the Persians’ part in this matter is no great
mystery: partisan sympathies of this kind were, and still are, almost de rigueur

among American and British diplomatists in the Middle East. John J. McCloy,
for instance, described MacArthur to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
in February 1974 as being ‘more Persian than the Persians sometimes’. Henry
Mayer Schuler of Bunker Hunt expressed a similar opinion: ‘Oftentimes the
representative of the United States becomes the representative of the country
to which he is accredited. His primary interests are in bilateral relations
between the United States and Iran and he could not care less about multilat­
eral oil negotiations. . . .’

Presumably much the same kind of recommendation as MacArthur made to
Washington was sent to the Foreign Office by the British ambassador in
Tehran, Sir Denis Wright, and for much the same reasons. Wright, who spent
the eight years before his retirement from the diplomatic service as ambassador
to Persia, was a passionate admirer of the shah and much attached to the
Persian people. He was also at this time deeply involved in negotiations with

the Persian government over the pending British withdrawal from the Gulf,
negotiations which included the satisfaction of the shah’s claims to Abu Musa
and the 1 unbs. Not surprisingly, there was little disposition on his part or that
0 the Foreign Office to disturb the even tenor of these negotiations by