"On Aug. 19, 2013, the CIA publicly admitted for the first time its involvement in the 1953 coup against Iran's elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh"
"The documents provided details of the CIA's plan at the time, which was led by
senior officer Kermit Roosevelt Jr., the grandson of U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt.
Over the course of four days in August 1953, Roosevelt would orchestrate not one, but two attempts to destabilize the government of Iran, forever changing the relationship between the country
https://www.npr.org/2019/01/31/690363402/how-the-cia-overthrew-irans-democracy-in-four-days
"Mohammad Mossadegh was a beloved figure in Iran. During his tenure, he introduced a range of social and economic policies,
the most significant being the nationalization of the Iranian oil industry.
Great Britain had controlled Iran's oil for decades
through the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co.
After months of talks the prime minister broke off negotiations and denied the British any further involvement in Iran's oil industry.
Britain then appealed to the United States for help,
which eventually
led the CIA to orchestrate the overthrow of Mossadegh
and restore power to Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran."
____
The Anglo-Persian Oil Company
(APOC; Persian: شرکت نفت ایران و انگلیس)
was a British company founded in 1909 following the discovery of a large oil field in
Masjed Soleiman, Persia (Iran).
The British government purchased 51% of the company in 1914, gaining a controlling number of shares, effectively nationalizing the company.
It was the first company to extract petroleum from Iran.
In 1935 APOC was renamed the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) when Reza Shah formally asked foreign countries to refer to Persia by its endonym
Iran."
"In 1954, it was renamed again to The British Petroleum Company,
one of the antecedents of the modern BP public limited company"
___
"Volume production of Persian oil products eventually started in 1913 from a refinery built at Abadan,
for its first 50 years
the largest oil refinery in the world (see Abadan Refinery). "
"Churchill wanted to free Britain from its reliance on
the Standard Oil
and Royal Dutch Shell oil companies.
In exchange for secure oil supplies for its ships, the British government injected new capital into the company and, in doing so, acquired a controlling interest in APOC."
After a hiatus caused by World War I, APOC reformed and struck an immense gusher at Kirkuk, Iraq in 1927, renaming itself
the Iraq Petroleum Company. "
"In August 1941, the Allied powers Britain and the Soviet Union
invaded and occupied Iran
in order to secure the oilfields and open a secure supply route to the USSR.
The Persian Corridor sent over 4 million tonnes of American Lend-Lease and other materiel alone"
"late December 1950, word reached Tehran that
the American-owned Arabian American Oil Company
had agreed to share profits with Saudis on a 50-50 basis.
The UK Foreign Office rejected the idea of any similar agreement for AIOC"
"On 7 March 1951, Prime Minister Haj Ali Razmara was assassinated by the Fada'iyan-e Islam, a Shia terrorist organization that supported nationalization of the AIOC"
By 1951, Iranian support for nationalisation of the AIOC was intense. Grievances included the small fraction of revenues Iran received. In 1947 for example, the AIOC reported after-tax profits of £40 million ($112 million), but
the agreement entitled Iran to just £7 million, 17.5% of profits.
Britain was profiting far more off Iranian oil than Iran was.
In addition, conditions for Iranian oil workers and their families were poor.
The director of Iran's Petroleum Institute wrote:
Wages were 50 cents a day. There was no vacation pay, no sick leave, no disability compensation.
The workers lived in a shanty town called Kaghazabad, or Paper City, without running water or electricity, ...
In winter the earth flooded and became a flat, perspiring lake. The mud in town was knee-deep, and ... when the rains subsided, clouds of nipping, small-winged flies rose from the stagnant water to fill the nostrils ....
Summer was worse. ... The heat was torrid ... sticky and unrelenting—while the wind and sandstorms shipped off the desert hot as a blower.
The dwellings of Kaghazabad, cobbled from rusted oil drums hammered flat, turned into sweltering ovens. ...
In every crevice hung the foul, sulfurous stench of burning oil ....
in Kaghazad there was nothing—not a tea shop, not a bath, not a single tree.
The tiled reflecting pool and shaded central square that were part of every Iranian town, ... were missing here.
The unpaved alleyways were emporiums for rats."
The British ratcheted up the pressure on the Iranian government and drew up a detailed plan of an invasion to occupy Abadan, code named "Buccaneer".
That plan was ultimately rejected by both Clement Attlee and Winston Churchill.
US President Harry S. Truman
and US ambassador to Iran Henry F. Grady opposed intervention in Iran but needed Britain's support for the Korean War."
The anti-Mossadegh plan was orchestrated by the CIA under the code-name 'Operation Ajax', and by SIS (MI6) as 'Operation Boot'.
The CIA utilized information obtain from British intelligence and
bribed politicians, soldiers,
mobsters,
and journalists to destabilize the country and consolidate opposition to Mosaddegh"
"Under pressure from the United States, BP was forced to accept membership in a consortium of companies which would bring Iranian oil back on the international market.
BP was incorporated in London in 1954 as a holding company called
Iranian Oil Participants Ltd (IOP).
The founding members of IOP included British Petroleum (40%), Gulf Oil (8%), Royal Dutch Shell (14%), and
Compagnie Française des Pétroles (now TotalEnergies SE, 6%).
"The four Aramco partners — Standard Oil of California (SoCal, later Chevron),
Standard Oil of New Jersey (later Exxon),
Standard Oil Co. of New York (later Mobil),
and Texaco – each held an 8% stake in the holding company.
In addition, these companies paid Anglo-Iranian about $90 million for their 60 percent share in the consortium, and a further $500 million, paid out of a ten cent per barrel royalty.
The Shah signed the agreement on 29 October 1954, and oil flowed from Abadan the next day. "
The founding members of the IOP at various stages came to be known as
the Supermajors, the "Seven Sisters",
or the "Consortium for Iran" cartel, and dominated the global petroleum industry from the mid-1940s to the 1970s.
Until the oil crisis of 1973, the members of the Seven Sisters controlled around
85% of the world's known oil reserves."
___
" British Aviator. She was the BTC’s first diesel engine oil tanker, and at that time the most powerful single-screw motor ship in the world."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Persian_Oil_Company
"In 1946, Princess Elizabeth launched the tanker British Princess for the APOC, and was given a sapphire brooch to mark the occasion.
In 1951, however, the situation changed dramatically, when the Iranian oil industry was nationalised, and the APOC removed all its staff from Iran."
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