Shock Treatment

Braced by a policeman's arm, Iran's Premier Mohammed Mossadeq tottered from the conference room in Teheran's Saheb Gharanieh Palace. To waiting newsmen he gasped: "No result--it's all over." Behind him trailed the U.S.'s W. Averell Harriman, tired and glum, and Britain's chief negotiator, Richard Stokes, who said: "I have no alternative but to regard the talks as suspended and to go home."

'Tont Pis." Thus last week ended another chapter in the sorry story of a Western failure in Iran. As the earnest agent of a belated U.S. effort to avert disaster in the oil-rich Middle East, Harriman tried to end the chapter more happily. In five weeks at Teheran, he seemed to have built a bridge of compromise between the moderate proposals of the British and the demands of fanatic Iranian nationalists. The British accepted "in principle" Iranian nationalization of their giant Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. But over the details of the enterprise's future operation there was no meeting of minds or emotions.

Brisk Businessman Stokes made a final offer: a businesslike partnership, in which profits would be split fifty-fifty, but with British technicians left in charge of the Abadan refinery. Anglophobe Mossadeq agreed to a British boss for the British staff; he balked over Iranians taking orders from Britons. "But you can't run a show that way," cried Stokes. "You can only have one boss." Mossadeq rejected the argument with his favorite French phrase: "Tant pis" (tough luck).

Behind the bargainers pressed the bedeviling antagonisms of history and nations. As Stokes explained later, "I told the Abadan staff [i.e., 2,000 Britons] I would not sell them down the river . . . They won't work except under competent British management." On his part, Mossa-

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