In retrospect recent events in Iran now came into sharp perspective; it was the unmistakable end game of a brilliantly conceived and executed Soviet campaign to wrest back the geopolitical strategic initiative from the victors of the Cuban Missiles War.
First there had been the deeply troubling events in the Mediterranean in December: the hostilities between the British and the Spanish which threatened to close the Straits of Gibraltar and to de-stabilize the North African coast; immediately followed by — bizarrely — the American bombing of Malta just before the rebellion which had left half of Washington DC in ruins. Next there had been the nightmare of a Red Dawn horde over running the Anatolian littoral of Turkey, infesting and defiling the Aegean and plunging the Balkans into bloody turmoil. The British had been driven off Cyprus, the Royal Navy had been attacked with Hiroshima-size nuclear weapons while attempting to recover the pre-October War cache of thermonuclear warheads stored on Cyprus, and in this and other operations in the Eastern Mediterranean; a cruiser had been sunk, an aircraft carrier crippled and several smaller warships lost or badly damaged.
As if this was not bad enough, on the morning of 7th February the most powerful ship ever to have steamed upon any ocean, the brand new nuclear-powered super carrier the USS Enterprise had been badly damaged by the airburst of one of two very large — low megaton range warheads — which had ‘missed’ their intended target, Malta, launched from deep within the Soviet Union. In that attack the Enterprise’s consort, the nuclear powered guided missile cruiser Long Beach and one of the two American ships’ flotilla of escorting British destroyers, HMS Aisne, had been destroyed by the same airburst, and only the courageous fire-fighting assistance of two other small Royal Navy ships, HMS Scorpion and HMS Talavera had, after many hours enabled Enterprise’s crew to contain and extinguish her fires.
One ICBM launched in the same salvo had over-flown Cairo before detonating relatively harmlessly several miles beyond the Great Pyramids of Giza, and a second had obliterated Ismailia in Egypt, this latter strike blocking the Suez Canal at Ismailia with several sunken merchantmen and an Egyptian Navy frigate. Thomas Barger was not alone in thinking that in the light of the Soviet invasion of Iran — and in due course, probably Iraq — that the obstruction of the Suez Canal making it impossible to transfer heavy forces quickly from the Mediterranean to either the Arabian Peninsula or to the Persian Gulf, was the cruellest of the unintended consequences of those February nuclear strikes. There were no roads or railways across the deserts of Sinai, Arabia, Jordan or Iraq connecting the Gulf to the Mediterranean; no way to transport tanks, vehicles, artillery, ammunition or the thousand and one spares and supplies a modern army required to fight a war from the United Kingdom, America, or anywhere in the Mediterranean other than by sending ships the ‘long way’ around the Cape of Good Hope. Dhahran was over twelve-and-a-half thousand miles from the United Kingdom or Malta by sea around the Cape; forty to sixty days steaming even if reinforcements could somehow, against the odds, be scraped together within the next few days which nobody thought was very likely.
Mistakenly, the British and the Americans had believed that February’s paroxysm of violence had burnt itself out when there had been no further attacks; in hindsight it was obvious that this had been just so much wishful thinking. The British had been preoccupied with retaking Cyprus, and with containing what seemed to be a waning Red Dawn menace in the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean, and with the arrival of several US Navy nuclear submarines in the theatre to ‘police’ the seaways in retrospect, a somewhat surreal — lull before the storm — calm had settled across the Eastern Mediterranean.
It was hardly surprising that when the storm struck it had been with utterly unexpected sudden violence which had come within an inch of carrying all before it.
At the very moment that Malta — the most strategically important Anglo-American base in the whole Mediterranean was virtually undefended, with practically the whole British Fleet deployed over a thousand miles away to retake Cyprus from the Red Dawn horde — an audacious Soviet combined sea and air assault on the Maltese Archipelago had come within an ace of overwhelming the under strength British garrison. But for the heroic action of the men of two small, hopelessly out-gunned and out-numbered Royal Navy warships; HMS Yarmouth and HMS Talavera, the Malta might have fallen to the Soviets in an afternoon.
Maskirovska!
It had all been a smokescreen.
Smoke and mirrors!
The Russian martial art of convincing one’s foe to fixate on one hand while landing a knockout blow with the other.
In the great scale of things it did not matter that Malta had resisted the invaders; what mattered was that the West’s gaze had been dragged back into the Central Mediterranean at the very moment two Soviet tank armies were crashing into the mountains of Iraq, and Tehran ceased to exist.
When Thomas Barger had joined Aramco the company had still been the Standard Oil Company of California; and much of the ‘real’ information he had thus far received about the crisis back home and elsewhere had been in cables sent from Aramco’s California offices, over two-and-a-half thousand miles away from the politicking in Philadelphia. That events in the mountains of Iran could so swiftly lead to a potentially irrevocably rift with the United Kingdom, supposedly the US’s oldest and closest ally, spoke eloquently to the ongoing tragedy of the age. It also confirmed to Thomas Barger what he had suspected at the time; that the Kennedy Administration had never intended to honour its side of the US-UK Mutual Defence Treaty negotiated in January. Beyond, that is, in areas it perceived to be of immediate vital national interest to the United States. The ‘Treaty’ had served its purpose, now it could be consigned to the dustbin of history. Back in December last year avoiding a war with the ‘old country’ had been the number one priority of the Administration in the aftermath of the Battle of Washington, and later the Administration had needed a fig leaf behind which to hide when it dramatically reversed 1963’s ‘peace dividend’ cuts to the military after the Battle of Washington. Back home the reversal of the cuts had already begun to re-energise the flagging American industrial machine, and given President Kennedy a shot at re-election in the fall. Cynics were already whispering that sending the US Navy to the Mediterranean in the interim had been a price worth paying to retain a foothold in Europe, ahead of the mammoth task of reconstruction, which stateside, it was assumed would sooner or later inevitably enrich the World’s only superpower beyond the dreams of Croesus…
Barger snapped out of the darkling cycle of his thoughts.
The Saudi Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources had been placidly studying the face of the man who was at once the single greatest obstacle to the Kingdom regaining control of its own massive oilfields; and the single most tangible symbol of American imperial might and therefore, until recently the ex officio guarantor of Saudi Arabian territorial integrity. The October War had created a new World order. It was now self-evident that in the aftermath of the Cuban Missiles War the Kingdom had made a series of bad decisions, several of which were now coming home to roost.
“What do you think is going on in the Philadelphia White House?” He asked softly.
The oilman shrugged.
Thomas Barger had been born in Minneapolis, Minnesota and grown up in Linton, North Dakota. After graduating from the University of North Dakota at Grand Forks with a degree in mining and metallurgy in 1931 he had spent several years in Canada and the American North West working as a surveyor, an engineer, assayer and as an under manager at a radium mine. Later he had taught at the University of North Dakota for a spell before joining the Anaconda Copper Mining Company. It was only when collapsing metal prices and the great Depression finally caught up with this last concern, coincidentally at the time he was contemplating marriage, that Barger had been compelled to seek work wherever he could find it. Thus had commenced the true odyssey of his life; within weeks of marrying Kathleen Elizabeth Ray he had journeyed to Saudi Arabia as a surveyor and geologist on the payroll of the Standard Oil Company of California and the rest, as they say, was history. Barger and a handful of other American geologists, escorted across the fastnesses of Arabia by Bedouins of the Ajman clan had been responsible for, in a few short years, the discovery and mapping of the great — then as now the biggest in the World — oilfields of the Kingdom known to its disparate tribes as al-Mamlakah al-Arabiyyah as-Su‘ūdiyyah.