Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"The discovery of the vast oil fields of southern Persia (today's Iran), the second largest after Saudi Arabia's, was made in 1908 by drillers working for a syndicate set up by the British entrepreneur William Knox D'Arcy, one of the founders of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company(APOC), today's British Petroleum (BP). . . . Oil would go on to largely dictate the politics of Iran and the wider middle east for a century and beyond. When APOC was nationalized by the government of Premier Mussadiq in the 1950s, an Anglo-American organized coup overthrew him and installed the pro-Western Shah Reza Pahlavi." [Furtado: 1001 Days]