The
lightening operation to seize Iranian oil fields and railroads to fuel
the Red Army was launched a few months after Germany invaded the Soviet
Union.
John Leake
For
most of the 19th century, the British and Russians vied with each for
control of Central and West Asia in what Rudyard Kipling the “Great
Game” in his 1901 novel Kim.
One of
the most intriguing British characters of this era was Harry St. John
Bridger Philby, also known as Jack Philby or Sheikh Abdullah. Philby was
a British Arabist, explorer, and key advisor to King Abdulaziz ibn
Saud, the founder of Saudi Arabia.
Though a member of the British
upper class, Harry seems to have harbored some sort of resentment
against the British, and he advised the Saudi King to sign a deal to
exploit Saudi Arabia’s oil fields with American instead of British
concerns.
Harry’s only son—Harold Adrian Russell Philby—whom he
nicknamed “Kim” after the titular spy in Kipling’s novel—became the most
notorious Soviet double-agent in the history of the British Secret
Intelligence Service.
In 1941, the Great Game between Britain and
the Soviet Union ended in the most spectacular conceivable way when
they jointly invaded Iran to secure its oil fields and railroads to
supply the Soviet Red Army with fuel to fight the Germans.
At the time, Iran had virtually no modern army with which to stop them, and their resistance collapsed in three days.
Though
I can already hear the howls of protest, I suspect that the
Europeans—including the British—will be forced by the looming energy
crisis to make peace with Russia and start purchasing gas via the one
remaining pipeline (Line B of Nord Stream 2) which was not ruptured by
the criminal act of sabotage in September 2022 that destroyed Nord
Stream One lines A and B and Nord Stream Two line A.
Russia has
pretty good relations with both Israel and Iran (hundreds of thousands
of Israelis hold dual citizenship with Russia) so I increasingly wonder
if Russia will need to play a role in bringing this disaster to an end
before it destabilizes and ruins the entire world.
The following YouTube video does a good job of recounting the 1941 invasion.