A history of BP

BP's original name was the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. It owes its existence to the corruption of Iran's monarchs, who over several decades sold off the country's resources to foreigners to support their own lavish lifestyles. The reigning Shah of Iran in 1891 sold Iran's entire tobacco industry to the British Imperial Tobacco Company for £15,000; the Tobacco Revolt, a mass boycott by the Iranian people, forced him to cancel the deal. In 1902 his son, the next shah, sold exclusive rights to Iran's oil and natural gas to a London financier, William Knox D'Arcy.

A group of British investors formed the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) to exploit what was called the D'Arcy concession. By 1913 Anglo-Persian was extracting huge amounts of Iranian oil and had built the world's largest oil refinery at Abadan. With World War I imminent, at the urging of Winston Churchill the British government bought a 51 percent share of the company. (In the 1980s Margaret Thatcher privatized the government's BP holdings.)

The terms of the D'Arcy concession were obscenely one-sided. Churchill called it "a prize from fairlyland beyond our wildest dreams." Iran was promised a 16 percent royalty, but the Brits cheated on the calculation and in 1920 paid Iran a pitiful £47,000, while they made millions from its oil.
"The standard of living that people in England enjoyed all during the 1920s and '30s and '40s was due to Iranian oil," says journalist Stephen Kinzer. "But at the same time, Iranians were living in some of the most miserable conditions of any people in the world."

The monarchy's sell-off of Iran's patrimony fueled popular opposition to the Qajar dynasty, which had ruled Iran since 1794. A rebellion in 1905 forced the Shah to accept a parliament (the Majlis) and constitution. But the monarchy and the British reversed many of the democratic reforms. In 1919 the British imposed the Anglo-Persian Accord giving them control of Iran's army, treasury, transport and communications – making Iran a virtual British colony. In a final revolt against the Qajars, the Majlis in 1925 deposed the hated Ahmad Shah and offered the Peacock Throne to an uneducated but ruthless military officer named Reza...

http://www.ueunion.org/uenewsupdates.html?news=561

for what's been de-empaphasied /selectively down played in the OP's link but not by intention of Hannah Bell.

In a scheme to get rid of Mossadegh, the British enlisted Secretary of State Dulles; he in turn enlisted his brother, CIA Director Allen Dulles, and what ensued was a truly masterful piece of skullduggery. First came a propaganda campaign to convince the West that Mossadegh was a communist, which in the U.S. of the 1950s put him on the level of a child molester. Actually, Mossadegh hated communists, but most of our press swallowed the lie. Time Magazine had previously called Mossadegh “the Iranian George Washington” and “the most world-renowned man his ancient race had produced for centuries.” Now it called him “one of the worst calamities to the anti-communist world since the Red conquest of China.”

The propaganda program on the outside was followed by a bogus “revolution” inside Iran, with a CIA agent-provocateur hiring such a huge army of thugs and terrorists to roam the streets of Tehran that the town fell into violent anarchy. The CIA plotters ousted Mossadegh and restored the shah to his Peacock Throne.

For Secretary of State Dulles and his old law clients — including Gulf Oil Corp., Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey, Texaco Inc., and Mobil Corp., who were subsequently allowed to take 40 percent of Iran’s oil supply — the shah’s return was a happy and very lucrative event. But, Kinzer reminds us, “The shah did not tolerate dissent and repressed opposition newspapers, political parties, trade unions, and civic groups. As a result, the only place Iranian dissidents could find a home was in mosques and religious schools, many of which were controlled by” radical fundamentalists. So when the revolution against the shah finally broke out in 1979, it was inevitable that these clerics led it.

http://aleksandreia.wordpress.com/2010/03/30/a-little-perspective-on-us-iran-relations/

The Dulles Bros were also subsequently involved with the coup in Gautemala which they felt necessary to protect their banana interests there.