A Profitable Trip

Iran last week celebrated Siezdahbedar, the 13th day of the Persian New Year, when evil spirits descend upon the cities and city dwellers flee to the countryside to have a picnic lunch beside a running stream. Thus there were no cheering crowds when Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin came to Teheran for a week-long state visit. But no difference: Kosygin was more than welcome. After years of nearly total dependence on the West, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi is turning his country increasingly toward Russia, his once hostile northern neighbor, seeking friendship, trade and backing for his ambitious industrial development plans. At the same time, his relations with the West, and in particular with the U.S., are becoming increasingly strained.

The Shah's problems with the U.S. are twofold. For one thing, Washington refuses to support his claim that the entire Persian Gulf--including the oil-rich island of Bahrain, an independent sheikdom that is one of the U.S.'s few remaining friends in the Arab world--belongs to Iran. For another, the British-American Consortium that operates Iran's own enormous oilfields refuses to bow to his demands to double production (now a record 130 million tons a year) in the next five years to finance his national-development program. The Shah is not at all impressed by consortium claims that the world oil mar ket is already glutted. Last month, when several of the consortium's member companies started drilling for offshore Saudi Arabian oil in the Persian Gulf, the Shah was so incensed that he dis patched patrol boats to stop the drilling and arrest the oilmen.

Glad to Unload. The Russians, on the other hand, have been bending over backward to be nice to Iran. Capitalizing on the Shah's determination to industrialize, they offer him heavy machinery and even fully installed industrial plants, complete with Soviet technicians, in exchange for iron ore and petroleum that the Iranians are only too glad to unload. Five other East European countries have followed Russia's lead, and together they have agreed to build him 19 major factories, 500 miles of railroad and a pipeline that will carry natural gas from the gulf to the Caspian Sea.

No project is dearer to Iranian hearts than the $300 million Russian steel mill now under construction at Isfahan. Steel mills are status symbols to all developing countries, and Iran has been yearning for one for more than 75 years. The Shah himself broke ground for the plant last month, and the declared purpose of Kosygin's trip was to pay a visit to its site. Obviously, there was not a great deal to see yet, but the aborning mill was a convenient excuse for the Soviet Premier to negotiate in person for even bigger deals.

Kosygin did not waste the chance. After attending a wrestling performance, he appeared at a state banquet to declare that "the Soviet Union is prepared to help Iran for the quickest possible exploitation of its natural resources." He also persuaded the Iranians to quintuple their Soviet trade, making Russia their biggest customer and biggest supplier. Finally, he talked the Shah into taking Russia in as a full partner in the exploitation of vast copper and oilfields that lie in central Iran. Even for Kosygin, it was an unusually profitable trip.

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