Leading the Pack: The Western Scramble for Iran: a special guest blog by Laila Parsons
This blog post has been written by guest blogger Laila Parsons, Associate Professor at McGill University. Laila is a Consultant Editor for Adam Matthew's new Archives Direct resource, Foreign Office Files for the Middle East, 1971-1981. The first module of this resource was published today - find out more about Module 1: Middle East 1971-1974: The Arab-Israeli War and the 1973 Oil Crisis here.
In the spring of 1974, Anthony Derrick Parsons took up his new post as British ambassador to Iran. This posting was his first ambassadorship. Previously he had worked on the Middle East desk in the Foreign Office, had served as Political Agent in Bahrain, and as First Secretary to the UK Mission to the United Nations in New York.
A few months after arriving in Iran, he wrote a long dispatch on British-Iranian relations intended for the eyes of the then British Foreign Secretary James Callaghan. The dispatch was dictated to Parsons’ private secretary in the ambassador’s office, on the top floor of the British embassy building. The embassy building and the ambassador’s palatial residence were situated in a large and leafy walled compound in southern Tehran, near Ferdowsi Square. Four years later, in November 1978, the same embassy building was burned to the ground by Iranian revolutionaries who blamed the British government for propping up the autocratic Shah of Iran, Muhammad Reza Pahlavi. But in the autumn of 1974, as Parsons dictated his dispatch to Callahan, Iran seemed like a stable, pro-Western monarchy with a booming economy that made it a potentially crucial market for British sales. In fact, Britain’s commercial interests in Iran were the central focus of British policy in the years before the outbreak of the revolution. Parsons’ dispatch was focused almost entirely on these interests:
“I am genuinely and objectively convinced, having been involved for the past few years with a large number of countries including Iran from my desk at the Foreign Office and having been in Iran for the past eight months, that the scale and scope of the opportunities at present emerging in Iran for the advancement of our material interests in the widest sense of the word are probably unprecedented in other parts of the world in recent years. Now, if ever, is the time for us to seize these opportunities. Only a few runners will emerge in the next year or so to lead the ferocious pack of competitors for Iran’s new found wealth. I hope that Britain will be one of these.”
Image © The National Archives, Kew. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
Britain did go on to “lead the pack” as the main winner of Iranian contracts. Tehran boomed with construction projects, and the Shah built up an arsenal of new weapons, many bought from British companies. But only a small percentage of Iranians really benefited from this economic growth. It is difficult to read the words in Parson’s dispatch without thinking of the Iranian revolution of 1978/79 and of the role that Britain played in supporting the increasingly corrupt regime of the Shah.
For me, this dispatch is also personal: Anthony Parsons was my father, and I grew up in the palatial ambassador’s residence in the leafy British embassy compound near Ferdowsi Square. It is hard to reconcile the cold-eyed British diplomat who authored the dispatch with the man I knew. My father was deeply knowledgeable about Iran and really cared about its future. He also formed deep and lasting friendships with Iranians. But above all else he was a British civil servant, and he regarded it as his job to promote British interests.
This did not mean that he always believed in the moral correctness of those interests. The careful reader of Parson’s dispatch to Callaghan might be able to detect this cynicism where he describes Britain and other Western competitors for Iranian contracts as a “ferocious pack.” He certainly saw the ugliness of the Western scramble for Iranian money, but as British ambassador it was his job to make sure that Britain did not lose out on the spoils.
To see this document, FCO 8/2268, please click here. Antony Parson's fascinating dispatch runs from image 41 to image 53.
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