Monday, Jul. 16, 1951

Bloody Holiday

An old, bucket-seated C-47, its U.S. Air Force insignia still showing faintly through a poor Iranian paint job, settled to the landing strip at Masjid-i-Sulaiman last week and rolled up to the hangar line. Out stepped Hussein Makki, firebrand of Iran's three-man Oil Liquidation Board, for a look at what an oilfield is like.

Crowds yelled "Ahy Makki" ("Oh, you Makki"). A man with a butcher knife slit the throat of a trussed-up bull to show that Makki was truly welcome. Makki, briskly stepping over a pool of blood, got into a baby blue Oldsmobile convertible. Drums began to pound and blood crimsoned the car's whitewall tires.

Next Premier? At "Discovery Well"* Makki stood silent for a moment, then went on to inspect the plant. Workers rushed forward, fell down before him to kiss his feet. Makki raised them up, making a fine distinction: he didn't want his feet kissed but he let them kiss his hands.

A month ago, Makki was sitting behind a rickety desk in a shabby room in downtown Teheran. Now he was taking over the billion-dollar Anglo-Iranian Oil Co., including the great Abadan refinery, which daily takes 500,000 barrels of crude oil at one end, and from the other pours gasoline, asphalt, kerosene at the rate of 2 1/2 tank cars a minute. Makki is not an engineer but a politician, and busy letting everyone know that he expects to be the next Prime Minister. The "engineers" on his "temporary board of directors" last week included a mechanical engineer with no oil background, a dairy expert. Makki's chief technical consultant is a young geologist who admitted he didn't know a catalytic cracker from a fractionating tower (Abadan has both).

Next: Harriman? To give the Iranians time to think things over, the British had cut Abadan's output to 25% of capacity, thus postponing still further the day when the huge plant will have to shut down for lack of storage facilities. But Mossadeq, Makki & Co. were in no mood to be reasonable. At The Hague, the International Court of Justice had just handed down an interim decision on Britain's appeal against nationalization. Ten of the twelve sitting judges recommended a truce: Britain and Iran should set up a joint board to supervise operation of the oilfields under the present management.

Britain promptly accepted. When several Iranians walked into Premier Mossa-deq's Teheran house to bring him word of the decision, they found him sleeping calmly while his cabinet sat by his couch, wrestling with the complications of nationalization. Awakened and given the news, he said flatly he would reject the court's ruling. This week President Truman sent Mossadeq a personal letter urging him to accept the court's decision and offering to send his top diplomatic troubleshooter, W. Averell Harriman, to Iran.

Guns Next to Peashooters. In Abadan, meanwhile, the remaining 2,200 British executives and technicians stewed at 125DEG F. in the shade and waited hopelessly for the break they knew would not come. One moment the Iranians wanted them to stay and work for the new Iranian National Oil Co., the next buffeted them savagely; looters boldly snatched packing cases while the police did nothing; Anglo-Iranian helplessly reported that $28,000 worth of refinery machine parts were being stolen every week.

Two thousand Iranian soldiers, toting U.S.-made equipment, goose-stepped through Abadan's native quarter, in a sputtering gesture of defiance at the British cruiser Mauritius and other British warships anchored close by, in the Shatt-al-Arab estuary. Commodore Morteza Dafteri, commander of the Iranian navy in the Persian gulf (five sloops whose 2.5-in. guns looked like peashooters alongside the Mauritius' 6-inchers) bravely shouted: "I have enough force here."

Hussein Makki moved into the mahog-any-and-leather-trimmed offices of Anglo-Iranian Manager Eric Drake who had fled (TIME, July 9), leaned back and enjoyed the latest in Philco air conditioning. He phoned Drake's chauffeur and ordered him to start picking him up every morning in the manager's big black Humber.

*Iran's first well, brought in by William Knox D'Arcy's prospectors in 1907, and long since an oilmen's shrine. Britons touch their hats as they pass its derrick.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.