IRAN: The Maneuvers of an Ally

In neighboring Iran, the Shah grew so nervous about the new power in Baghdad that he demanded changes in the proposed new U.S.-Iranian agreement, to guard against invasion from Iraq as well as from Russia. It was hardly the kind of guarantee the U.S. could give. But in an attempt to bring the U.S. around, the Shah received a special Soviet diplomatic mission to his country to draft a new Soviet-Iranian nonaggression treaty (a tactic he had previously deplored when Egypt's President Nasser tried it).

Soviet negotiators demanded that in return Iran should sign no pact with any other country permitting it to set up bases in Iran. President Eisenhower sent the Shah a strong letter, presumably reminding him that the U.S. had stood by his country when the Russians invaded his northern provinces in 1946. Washington also promised more aid. At week's end the Russians went home emptyhanded.

In a three-column editorial headed "The Perfidious Policy of Iran," Pravda roared that the Shah's "two-faced dealings" would earn him the same dark fate as Cuba's Batista and Iraq's late King Feisal. If the Shah needed any precedent for his maneuverings he could cite the way Molotov bargained for weeks with the British in 1939 and then confronted them with the secretly drawn Stalin-Hiuer pact.