740.0011 European War 1939/14326
Memorandum by the Chief of the Division of Near Eastern Affairs (Murray) to the Secretary of State
Mr. Secretary: The Iranian Minister came to see me urgently this morning without appointment and told me that he has been instructed by his Government to deliver an important message to you this afternoon, I have spoken with your office and they are to let me know whether you will be able to see the Minister after your return from lunch. During my visit with the Minister this morning he informed me that his Government urgently hopes that the President will communicate with the British, Soviet, and Iranian Governments urgently requesting them to cease hostilities at once and to engage in conversations looking towards a settlement of the present dispute. I assume that this communication is identical with that which we received this morning from Mr. Dreyfus and which we discussed in your office earlier in the day.
In discussing the present démarche of his Government the Minister said that in his opinion the request was both in the interest of Iran as well as of the United States. In explanation of this statement he emphasized that on every previous occasion of aggression in the world this Government had raised its voice in violent condemnation and protest. The world had come to regard the conscience and idealism of America as an established fact and expected that our voice would be raised on every such occasion regardless of the offender. If, in the present case of British and Soviet aggression, we sit passively by, and [Page 422] by our silence appear to condone these acts, the Minister feels that we will suffer a great loss in moral authority in the world.
Without commenting on the above observations of the Minister, I told him that I wanted to offer a purely personal suggestion. I was not in a position to advise him officially as to what his Government should do in this matter, but that in my own entirely personal opinion it would be advisable to face the present situation realistically. Nazi aggression is of course a fact and the British are quite naturally afraid of its spread into Iran and other parts of the Near East in the same manner as it spread earlier into Iraq and Syria. Such a situation would of course constitute a grave danger for British interests in that part of the world. Iran could not of course alone defend herself against Nazi aggression in case the Germans reached the Caucasus. Such being the case and with the reality of British and Soviet troops starting to occupy the country it seemed to me that it would be in the best interest of Iran to initiate forthwith negotiations direct with the British with a view to working out some system of collaboration for the common defense of the country. Such collaboration might even partake of the nature of an alliance as had been the case in the collaboration between the Turks and the British.
The Minister seemed much shocked and disappointed with my suggestion and said he had expected a more sympathetic attitude from me. I replied that we were not dealing with a situation in which an ideal solution was easy to find but were dealing with hard facts and endeavoring to bring about a solution that would cause the Iranian people the least harm. In making the above observations to the Iranian Minister I made it clear that I was not speaking for the Department but was merely voicing my own personal suggestion.
During the further course of our conversation I made reference to the possibility of Turkey acting as a friendly intermediary in this matter between the Iranians, the British, and the Soviets. The Turks were, I suggested, in a favorable position to assist all parties concerned in view of their treaty of alliance with Great Britain.
The Minister returned again and again to the point that this Government could not and should not allow a brutal act of aggression such as the present one to go by without some expression of condemnation or some effort to stop it. I tried to make clear to the Minister that we regard the British cause as our cause and that in the common effort to put down aggression we necessarily had to take account of the undoubted dangers of aggression spreading into areas of the Near East vital to the defense of the British Empire.