Office of the Historian

891.6363/7–744: Telegram

The Secretary of State to the Chargé in Iran (Ford)

Washington, July 7, 1944—8 p.m.

411. Military Attaché98 Tehran has informed the War Department that the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company has reportedly applied to the [Page 487] Iranian Government to buy the land at Abadan99 on which the United States air field, camp and assembly plant have been built. Such a purchase, it is thought, would be a serious blow to the large American investment involved and to eventual postwar rights on the fields.

Please give the Department urgently any information you may obtain on this subject.

Hull
  1. Col. Joseph K. Baker.↩
  2. Island 40 miles long by 2 to 12 miles wide in the Shatt-al-Arab delta in western Iran; the town of Abadan on the island is the terminus of the oil pipe line from Masjid-i-Sulaiman, one of the important oil fields of western Iran, and has large oil refineries.↩