Frank E. Maestrone

Consul and Principal Officer in Khorramshahr in 1960-62

Hank Zivetz

2025-4-8

Frank E. Maestrone was born in Massachusetts in 1922. He received his bachelor’s degree from Yale University in 1943. He was a first lieutenant in the United States Army from 1943 to 1946. Frank E. Maestrone joined the State Department in 1948 and served in Austria, Germany, Egypt, Kuwait, and the Philippines. Mr. Hank Zivetz interviewed Mr. Maestrone in 1989.

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Q: None whatever. Moving along, as a sidebar to the recent Iran-Iraq war, I know that you were consul and principal officer in Khorramshahr in 1960-62, when the oil terminal was constructed on Kharg Island. Was there any indication at that time that this remote area would become the focus of a bloody war?

MAESTRONE: Well, when I was in Khorramshahr, we had two crises that occurred between Iran and Iraq. Both of them were over the question of how the boundary line that was set along the Shatt-al-Arab River. The Shatt-al-Arab is formed, as you know, by the confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates and then flows past Basra in Iraq, and past Khorramshahr and Abadan in Iran into the Persian Gulf. These crises concerned the question of the boundary line as I have mentioned—namely, that in 1913 a boundary commission accepted the boundary between Iran and Iraq at that point at the low water mark of the Shatt-al-Arab on the Iranian side.

Q: Boundary commission made up of whom?

MAESTRONE: The boundary commission was made up of the Ottoman Turks, who were then in control of the other side of the Shatt-al-Arab, what is now Iraq. The Russians and the British, and I think the Iranian government was also represented there, but in those days the Russians and the British pretty much ran Iraq.

Q: Iran, you mean.

MAESTRONE: I’m sorry, Iran, and the British were particularly influential in southern Iran.

Q: Did this dispute result in violence?

MAESTRONE: What actually happened was the Iranians were shipping so much oil from Abadan and also from other ports to the major international oil companies. I think the seven sisters, so called, were almost all involved in the Iranian consortium. It was operating the Iranian oil production at that time. The Iranians felt that this would be a good time to establish their claim that the dividing line between Iran and Iraq should run along the median line or the middle of the Shatt-al-Arab River, which is the normal way boundary lines are set when bodies of water, or particularly rivers, divide two countries or states.

Therefore, the particular thing that bothered them was that every ship coming up into Abadan and Khorramshahr had to have an Iraqi pilot, since the waters were Iraqi territory. They felt that this was very demeaning for ships to come up to the great country of Iran with an Iraqi pilot leading them into Abadan and Khorramshahr, which were their major ports in those days. Therefore, they decided that they would no longer accept any ship which had an Iraqi pilot aboard. They thought that the Western countries would want their oil so badly that they would send their ships up anyway and the Iraqis wouldn’t dare challenge the Western powers. Well, in fact, the Iraqis moved artillery down along the banks of the Shatt-al-Arab and said that any ship coming up without an Iraqi pilot would be shelled. So captains of oil tankers were not about to run their ships up the Shatt-al-Arab under that sort of a threat. So nobody came up the river.

The Iranians expected the Western powers to exert pressure on Iraq to force them to make this change. The Western powers had no intention of doing that, and eventually, after about a month, when all their tanks became filled, and they were starting to cut back on the refining of oil in Abadan because they had no place to put it, the Iranians finally desisted and gave up their...

Q: Who was the ruler of Iran at this time?

MAESTRONE: The Shah.

Q: The Shah, the Pahlavi, not the father.

MAESTRONE: No.

Q: What was the American official government attitude in this controversy between Iraq and Iran at that time?

MAESTRONE: Well, our attitude was one of being completely neutral in this. This was a local affair in which we were not interfering.

Q: Did the British exert any influence?

MAESTRONE: No, they took the very same position. All of them took the same position. As far as I was concerned, I talked to the people who were responsible for this down in Abadan and pointed out to them that their case was hopeless if they expected the Western powers to come to their assistance. But they refused to accept my advice, and finally, had to give in. This not only happened once, but it happened twice. The next year, at the urging of the new Abadan port director, who was, incidentally, a very cultured, well-educated man. He had been educated in Switzerland and Belgium, spoke fluent French, excellent English. At his urging, the Shah, I guess, authorized their undertaking the same effort again, which resulted in the same failure, and my good friend, the port director, ended up in jail in Tehran.

Q: Was this before the United States began to arm and support Iran as one of our bulwarks in that part of the world?

MAESTRONE: Yes, this was, in one sense, this was before we began making major arms shipments to Iran. Although we were supplying them with military equipment and we did maintain military advisory groups, MAG groups, there. We had a small one in Khorramshahr, at the Navy base there. A couple of naval officers were there helping with training and handling some of the technical aspects of the equipment, the way they were being supplied. We had a MAG group up in Ahvaz, which was the capital of Khuzestan, the major province of my consular district, from which most of the oil came. They were helping train the Iranian Army. But the training was more basic at that point.

Later on, as the Iranian Army improved its general capabilities, the decision was made in the time of President Nixon and Henry Kissinger that the Shah would become our bulwark in the Middle East. They supplied him with all sorts of very sophisticated arms, and it was a different situation to that extent.

Q: One more observation on Iran before we move to another part of the world. Could you at that time assess the attitude of the Iranian people toward the Shah, and perhaps, to project what ultimately happened in Iran?

MAESTRONE: I was, perhaps, not in as good a position as others in Iran, those in Tehran and other consulates, because my consular district had a population which was about 75% Arab. The Iranians who were there were pretty much the managers, supervisors, etc., of the operations, particularly the oil operations that took place there, or business people, all of whom were very supportive of the Shah. But even the Arab population, the Arab-Iranians, if you can call them that, were all very loyal to the Shah. There were some who were unhappy when he dropped Soroya and got his new queen, Farah Diba. For quite some time there were stories of some of the bazaaris having pictures of the Shah and Soroya still hanging in the backs of their shops, whereas, they should have been hanging up a picture of Farah Diba, which was passed around, of course. But many of those shopkeepers tended to be Iranians and particularly Bakhtiaris, from which tribe Soroya originally came.

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