The battle for Iran's oil concessions: the rivalry between Russia and Britain
In the early years of the 20th century, two great powers, Tsarist Russia and Britain, fought to obtain concessions to exploit Iran's natural resources. In 1907, a peace treaty was signed and Iran was divided into spheres of interest. The British and the Germans also negotiated with the representative of the Turkish Sultan for the possession of the lands between the Tigris and the Euphrates before the First World War.
Canadian engineer D'Arcy, who in 1901 was granted an unlimited right to geopolitical exploration throughout Persia for 66 years for a bribe of £20,000, discovered oil in 1908 in the "Mosque Solomon" field 150 kilometres from Mozaffaradin Shah, 150 kilometres from the Persian Gulf. The British intelligence service was informed of this. The First Lord of the British Admiralty, Winston Churchill, later Prime Minister, the Minister for the Navy, considered it so important to supply the fleet with fuel that he urged the government to find a way to obtain the concession from D'Arcy. The British government was willing to invest £2.5 million in the venture.
The background investigation revealed that D'Arcy is a very religious man who plans to sacrifice his valuable property for the "Christian conversion" of Iran and through it China. In order to carry out his plan, he decided to return to his country to prepare for its implementation.
British intelligence and oil: the case of Sidney Reilly and D'Arcy
The ship he was travelling on was boarded in the port of Alexandria by an English missionary priest who managed to gain D'Arcy's trust. The two men developed such a close relationship that they agreed to raise the funds for the mission in England through D'Arcy's petroleum exploration licence. Indeed, the missionary promised to recruit priests from the church for the work. As it later turned out, the priest was none other than Sidney Reilly, one of the most skilled agents of British intelligence, who thus obtained D'Arcy's petroleum exploration licence, which Britain used to form the Anglo-Persian Petroleum Company on 14 April 1909. The British government took 56% of the shares. The British wanted to get more than that, so they decided to squeeze the Germans out of the Iranian market. To carry out their plan, they first had to get some of the oil concessions from corrupt ministers in the Turkish court. Carloust Gulbenkian, of Armenian origin but a British citizen, was chosen for the job, as he was working as an oil expert in Turkey at the time. The oil adventurer was familiar with both oil business and financial transactions. In 1909, the Sultan and Grand Vizier were deposed under the leadership of the young Kemal Atatürk. The Turkish Oil Company was established. In 1911, Gulbenkian acquired from the Germans most of Iran's shares and the right to use the railway, all of which he played into the hands of Royal Dutch Shell and the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. The concession of Deutsche Bank's Anatolian railway company also gave Gulbenkian the right to explore for oil in the Baghdad area and Mosul. This concession gave Deutsche Bank a 25 per cent stake in the Turkish Petroleum Company in 1912, with a further contract. Gulbenkian received a 5 per cent stake in what later became the Iraq Petroleum Company (ITC) as an intermediary fee.
The displacement of the Germans and the emergence of the British oil monopoly
However, the conversion of the British navy to oil firing required even more petroleum products and propellants. Therefore, the British diplomatic and secret service decided to acquire the remaining German shares. Negotiations took place in the British Foreign Office building, where the German bank agreed to sell 47.5 percent of the shares in the Turkish oil company it owned to the Anglo-Persian oil company. The result was that on the same day the two countries declared war on each other.
