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    "ocrText": "5/15/54: Reel 3, Track 2, Page 4\nMR. ACHESON:\nMacDougall I guess it was; and somebody who may have been from the oil\ncompanies We presented this-II told him about our discussions with\nMossadegh and assured him we had not undertaken to negotiate for the British.\nfollow up\nWe tried the general line of talks carried on by Averell and\nby Stokes when he got out there; we had tried to pick it up, and laid out\nfor him what we had accomplished. And the British attitude was absolutely\nadamant no--no discussion; there was no give; there was no debate. Leslie\nRowan took the view which I described earlier that this was an attack\non British foreign investments; it had to fail; it had to be crushed; it\nis & 3\nhad to be punished; there was no ive about it at all. The people from\nU.S.\nthe Ministry of Fuel attacked every idea that we had; they thought they were\nand wrong;\nvisionary there was no possibility in them; they insisted that we had to\nhave a judiciary deternination' of just compensation. They went all over the\npoints we talked about earlier this afternoon. I tried to point out, as\nAverell and dihers had earlier, that whatever the mechanics were, whatever\nyou did about this, the only element of payment, the only thing of value\nthat there was here was the Iranian oil industry. And if you didn't get\nthat working, then nobody had anything; it was a complete loss on all sides.\nBut that got absolutely nowhere at all. We reported this to the department;\nHarold came to see me. I think I had one other talk with Eden, and the\nanswer was a complete no. There was no disposition of any sort to explore\nwhat we tried to do or to be helpful about it or to get forward with\nit\nat\nall. So it seemed to me that we had come to the end of the thing; we had\nbetter give it up. And in Washington George told Mossadegh that this was\nall over; that we weren't able to do anything. Just how we got out of this\nthing-I remember that one of our great problems was to get out of this\nthing without really making the British the bad boys that they R really\nwere, and how you did that, George, I don't know.\nMR. McGHEE:\nWe issued a statement where wa said that we had explored with both sides\nand we found that they were both still so far apart that we didn't have"
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