along with Hoveyda's job. Leaving Iran once again in 1952, Hoveyda was able to secure a position with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees through the help of his European contacts. As a liaison officer, he was given the task of visiting various continents, including Asia, Africa, and the Americas, promulgating the plight of refugees and in effect receiving several commendations from high ranking UN officials. The Iranian embassy in Turkey would serve to be Hoveyda's final official position outside Iran's frontiers. Assistant to the ambassador, who so happened to be the father of his good friend, Hassan-Ali Mansour, Hoveyda would make a quick exit after Mansour's father was replaced by an authoritarian army general in 1957. Rise to power Hoveyda's rise to power involved many years of service within the ministry of foreign affairs, but this path took on a whole new approach once he joined the Board of Directors of the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) in 1958 at the behest of his patron Abdullah Entezam, who had by then assumed a high ranking position at the company. As managing director and special assistant to Entezam, Hoveyda used his experiences in the West to transform management-worker relations. As an example, he introduced innovative methods by which workers filed grievances in regard to any aspect of the working environment they deemed unsatisfactory, and helped to figuratively enmesh the roles of management and the labourers into a collective entity. One way he went about doing this was by eating many of his meals alongside wage labourers in the cafeteria. Although he advocated the emulation of Western models to improve overall productivity and worker relations, Hoveyda was very outspoken in favour of expelling foreign technicians and attracting indigenous sources of labour. It was during his tenure in which the NIOC's periodical, Kavosh (Persian: Exploration), was first published. What is unique about this magazine is that it was, initially, virtually void of any semblance of the growing cult of personality which surrounded the Shah. Continuing his duties as managing director at the NIOC, Hoveyda also helped Hassan Ali Mansour in establishing a semi-independent group of highly trained, Western educated, and young technocrats. The organization's main goal was to devise methods of rectifying the nation's ailing economy. Known as the Progressive Circle, this government sponsored dowreh ("Persian for a gathering held at regular intervals") was a deliberate attempt by the shah to