Memories of Islamic Middle East and Africa

Al Hanners is a retired geologist who worked worldwide for a major U.S. oil company for nearly five decades. He worked in the Middle East for the company in the early 1970s.

Part 2

There were no lanes marked on the streets. Drivers cut right and left jockeying their way through the morning rush hour traffic. It was an accident waiting to happen and we were hit by another taxi. Luckily nobody was hurt. We found another taxi and my colleagues and I continued our way to the Iran Consortium’s head office in Tehran, Iran, to attend an annual meeting of representatives of the member oil companies. It was in the mid 1960s and I represented Texaco.

On our way I saw women driving cars but no women wearing headscarves. I saw no women at all at the consortium office, so atypical of the ubiquitous female receptionists and secretaries in American offices. What I did see at the offices were Iranian men, unfriendly it seemed. Why were they unfriendly? Was it the role of Western heretics with the better jobs in an Islamic country? Or was it American support for Israel? Antipathy for Americans because of our support for Israel had roots long before I arrived in Iran. In those days you could not enter some Islamic countries with a visa to enter Israel on your passport.

There were allegations that the U.S. State Department would issue you two passports, one to use for Israel, the other to use for Islamic countries. That never bothered me. I had neither desire nor need to go to Israel. One passport was enough. As for the glum Iranian men, I would only guess. But that experience did stimulate my interest in whether or not women were becoming emancipated by the Shah’s regime. The answer is yes, but only temporarily. As it turned out, women’s rights retrogressed with the fall of the Shah.

Hydrocarbons in Iran have a long history. Some people consider the Bible’s burning bush that was not consumed by fire to have been a natural gas seep.

British influence in Iran also has a long history. At one time the British administered Iran and India as a single colony. Indeed, the Persians were closely related to the people of Northern India as indicated by close similarity of Persian language to Sanskrit. They called themselves Arayan. In 1935, the name Iran was officially adopted for the country other countries had called Persia.

In view of the long British influence, it is not surprising that a British company, Anglo Iranian, was the first to produce Iranian oil. Oil was produced from fractures of limestone; wells were highly productive and profitable. Ownership changed several times, mostly through illegal action. The Iranian government confiscated the original British company’s oil rights. Then a revolution, some say backed by British interests and America’s CIA, installed the Shah of Iran who restored British oil rights, but producing oil in Iran was still very risky business.

British Petroleum hedged the risk by forming the Iranian Consortium comprised of British Petroleum with controlling interest; American companies including Texaco, Chevron, Mobile and Gulf; and Total, a French company, all with minor interests. Thus there were member companies of three nationalities, strength and political clout, but in the end to no avail. Later, another revolution overthrew the Shah. He was displaced by an Islamic theocracy that is still in power in the 21st century.

Texaco managed its Eastern Hemisphere oil interests through joint ventures. The Iranian Consortium was one of them. Each year the consortium would present an exploration and production plan and budget to shareholders in its Tehran office, and I was very fortunate to have represented Texaco one year.

After the budget presentation there would be a fantastic two-week tour of Iran led by Hollis Hedberg, the respected chief geologist of Gulf Oil. There would be no allegations of British Petroleum dominating anything. Presumably the reason for the trip was that people get acquainted and get along best where they are doing something they enjoy. On one hand, the representatives played hooky by visiting geological and archaeological sites that had nothing to do with oil geology. On the other hand, there was a happy hour before dinner that gave representatives on opportunity to sound out opinions of others on subjects that might be controversial.

Here is an example: I noticed that no oil prospects were being explored toward the border with Iraq. “Why don’t we do that?” I asked. “No,” old-timers replied, “We can’t do that, the international border is disputed.” The old-timers were right. A very bloody war between Iran and Iraq that followed now is history. In essence, de facto shareholders’ control was by consensus. The vote on the budget occurred only after return to Tehran.

During the entire trip, we traveled some 700 miles by car plus a trip by airplane to see a salt dome with the top exposed. In Southern Iran I tasted the salt. The logistics must have been enormous. We camped out at night on flat ground along the highway we were traveling. When we arrived at our destination for the day, there was a large tent already set up where we would relax and have a drink during happy hour.

Then the tent was converted to a dining room and we had dinner. Tents with cots were provided for sleep at night. Lunch was more on a do-it-yourself basis. Cans of meat, flat brown bread and soft drinks were set out. My lunch inevitably was a corned beef sandwich and a soft drink. We were told to leave the cans and bottles on site. Local people would pick them up and value them as containers, an eye opener to the poverty in rural Iran. The sense of poverty was reinforced when I saw a man working in a field who was wearing the coat of a western style dress suit. “Why oh why, is he wearing that?” I wondered. Much later I learned that old clothes donated to charities often end up sent to third world countries where they are sold.

As we went south from Tehran we stopped at bas-reliefs, carvings on rectangular vertical rock slabs where the images stood out from a flat background. I recognized some as the same I had seen photographs of in books on Middle East archeology. They were well cared for, but there were others quite as impressive overgrown with brush. The reason for so many bas-reliefs in that area was never revealed to us, but I suspect we were in the vicinity of an ancient capital of Persia.

Persepolis is the crown jewel of the Persian capital. Built by the ruler Darius (522-456 B.C.) at the time when the Persians were fighting the Greeks, it is in remote alpine foothills. Darius is said to have used it more as a residence than as a capital, presumably to escape summer heat in the real capitals of Sousa, Babylon and Escatana.

We were immediately engrossed by the view of Persepolis from the parking lot. The ancient capital itself is on a large terrace held in place by a wall. On the edge were two large, square pillars, which, like the retaining wall, were built of rocks without the use of mortar. On each of the pillars rested a huge winged bull. Worship of bulls is said to have been part of ancient Persian religion.

The top of the terrace was reached by an ancient double staircase with individual steps much smaller than are in common use today. On one side of the staircase was a bas-relief of men headed for the top of the terrace. They are of the size that would have comfortably used the actual stairs. In retrospect, I found the ceiling of the passageway into the Pyramid of Giza to be very low. Surely typical men in ancient Persia and Egypt were much smaller than today.

We saw the largest avalanche in the world in the Zagros Mountains. The rubble spread over a huge area. Layers of hard sedimentary rocks separated by softer weaker rock layers had inclined toward a river. When the river eroded its bank, those rocks fell down as a huge avalanche. Years later while driving Highway #3 in Canada, we came upon the Hope Slide, named after the nearby town of Hope. It was still there but someone had cleared a rough path through the rubble. I immediately recognized it as a slide similar to that I’d seen in Iran. Later, that section of road was rebuilt and a sign was put up that gave the details of the Hope Slide.

For me one of the highlights of the trip was a school where preteens were taught to read. The building had a roof but no sides. Happy boys and girls were there together. What a stride toward emancipation of women!

But my experience in an oil field camp eclipsed that at the school. After spending the day in the oil field, the manager invited us to dinner. In the American tradition I was accustomed to in an oil field camp in South America, Iranian management and other senior staff and their wives were invited. I had enough of talking work for the day, so I talked to an Iranian woman. She, too, seemed to be happy not to have to sit idly by while the men talked business. She had been sent to England to learn to be a midwife. Back in Iran she practiced her profession. After a woman had had a baby she would be receptive to learning birth control. The mid-wife would teach her.

On return to Tehran I had a different hotel room. This time from my hotel window I saw mounds of earth like equally spaced giant molehills along a line leading from the foothills of the distant mountains to the city. They were called gnats, the places where dirt had been thrown out to build a shallow tunnel to bring water to the city. There were no pipes. Water flowed along the bottom of the tunnel. The earthen mounds disappeared in the city but the tunnel continued. Persians have a long history of literacy beginning with ancient cuneiform writing, wedge-shaped characters pressed into clay. Poetry is part of Iranian culture. Iran has married its pride in gnats with its love of poetry by dedicating a gnat in the city to a famous poet. I visited it. Tiles line the walls and steps lead down to a platform just above water level, a must to be seen by natives and tourists alike.

Why was the Shah of Iran overthrown and replaced by an Islamic theocracy? I have no inside information, but this is what I believe. Surely, Islamic men who follow a religion that allows men to have three wives and force women to cover up with head scarves would deeply resent the Shah’s emancipation of women they have dominated. Moreover, my experience in Venezuela indicates that dictators enforce their power with cruelty. Eventually, a dictator has tortured and killed so many members of the leading families in the country that they unite to overthrow him. There were creditable allegations that the SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police, had tortured Iranian citizens.

In the years that followed my trip to Iran, hatred of Israel continued and at best antipathy toward the Americans continued. Iran funds Palestinians and helps its former enemy, Iraq, in the current guerilla war against the United States. Now Iran is determined to build atomic bombs, has purchased some centrifuge tubes, and is said to have succeeded in concentrating some material for making atomic bombs. On March 4, 2006, The Bellingham Herald said this: “Iran and the European Union inched toward a possible compromise that would allow Tehran to run a scaled-down uranium enrichment program despite its potential for misuse by building atomic weapons. Recently Iran warned the United States that an attempt to interfere would have dire consequences.” §

Next Month: Libya and Turkey