Page 355 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

352 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

approval of, the United States and other Western governments. The com­
panies were therefore obliged to respect the compact which had been made.
Amuzegar blithely dismissed this objection. ‘If you think you have a problem
with your government,’ he said airily, ‘I am quite confident that they will agree
to a regional or Gulf approach.’
The shah was equally confident about the matter when he spoke to Wright,

the British ambassador, the next day. He was ‘under the impression’, he said,
‘that the Americans accepted the “Gulf only” procedure’. Such confidence as
both he and his finance minister displayed could only have been generated by
their conversations with Irwin and MacArthur; for the State Department’s
adoption of the latter’s recommendations had not yet been formally communi­
cated to Tehran. Here, if anywhere, is confirmation of what Senator Frank
Church of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was later to condemn, at a
hearing of the sub-committee on multinational corporations of which he was
chairman, as ‘waffling’ (in its American sense of shilly-shallying) on the part of
the United States government in its support of the oil companies. What was
more, the confidence exuded by the shah and Amuzegar was merely a reflec­

tion of MacArthur’s own confidence that his recommendation that the negotia­
tions be split would be endorsed by the State Department, a confidence which
could only have proceeded from the knowledge that the views he held on the
proper posture for the United States to adopt in the Middle East were in
the ascendant at the State Department. Small wonder that John J. McCloy, the
counsel for the c-il companies, was to remark laconically to Church’s sub­
committee three years later: ‘We weren’t too much impressed, if I may say so,

by the attitude of the US government.’
After the preliminary meeting of 19 January Piercy and Strathalmond cabled
their impressions to the London Policy Group.

It is not easy to advise what should be done. If we commence with Gulf negotiations we
must have very firm assurances that stupidities in the Mediterranean will not be
reflected here. On the other hand, if we stick firm on the global approach, we cannot but
think ... that there will be a complete muddle for many months to come. Somehow we
feel the former will in the end be inevitable.

The Tehran negotiators’ pessimism communicated itself to the London Policy
Group. Support from the United States government had evaporated (if it ha

ever existed in solid form); the French and British governments had all along
been half-hearted in their backing for the combined approach; and the tate
Department was constantly urging the companies to be conciliatory. In ese
circumstances, the London Policy Group decided there was no alternative u
to split the negotiations. Strathalmond would lead the Gulf negotiating team in
Tehran, Piercy the Mediterranean team in Tripoli. It was still the corVpanJ\s

intention, however, that the two teams should operate as one: neit ei•
empowered to negotiate terms independently of the other, and any p P