Over the years Barger’s fellow geologists and surveyors had moved on to other things but he had remained, captivated and enthralled by Arabia. By the time the oilfields started to come into full production in the late 1940s he was Aramco’s — the company’s name had changed to the ‘Arabian American Oil Company’ on 31st January 1944 — key link with the Saudi authorities. For many years he was Aramco’s Director of Local Government Relations and by the 1950s the right hand man of the corporation’s cavalier go-getting CEO, Norman ‘Cy’ Hardy, whom he had eventually replaced in 1961.
Barger was aware of the uncomfortable silence. He shrugged an apology to his guest and forced his mind to consider the unpalatable practicalities of the unfolding crisis. Latterly, his thought processes turned like those of so many of his Arab friends; when he went home he often found his countrymen rude, crass, clumsily over-direct and impatient when simple common courtesy demanded circumlocution rather than a stab at the heart of a thing.
“I don’t think you dealings with my old boss, Cy Hardy?” He asked Yamani, wholly rhetorically. “Cy was the ultimate ‘one page’ man. He believed that nothing was so complicated that it needed to be written on more than one page. If you didn’t say what you needed to say on the first page you were wasting your time. I wonder how Cy would have coped with things the way they are now?”
The Minister of Petroleum and Mineral resources considered this unhurriedly, understanding exactly what the American was trying to tell him ‘between the lines’. In many ways the Chief Executive Officer of Aramco, superficially very much an American ‘company man’ operating in a supposedly alien environment, was infinitely more intuitively attuned to the Arab mind than he was to those of any of his stockholders back in the United States. He had lived so long in the desert beneath the great tent of the Kingdom that he saw things very differently from his fellows ‘back home’.
How could it be otherwise?
Ahmed Zaki Yamani was of that generation of privileged young Saudis whom necessity had decreed should be educated abroad. In that way they might be exposed to the ways of the modern milieu and to the temptations of the West. While within the Kingdom Islamic orthodoxy — Sunni Wahhabism, in his own tongue ad-Da'wa al-Wahhābiya — admitted of no fault, no room for accommodation and compromise with the infidel; pragmatically, it was recognized that peacefully asserting control over its own oil and gas fields was going to demand a certain sleight of hand. Consequently, many young men like Yamani, of distinguished, but not invariably noble lineages had been sent abroad to learn what they might about the ways of the World.
Yamani, the son of a Qadi — a respected judge and scholar of Islamic law — who was currently the Grand Mufti of Indonesia and Malaysia, was one of the first of the new generation to rise to prominence in the Kingdom. Having earned a law degree at King Fouad I University in Cairo, the government had sent him to the Comparative Law Institute at New York University, where in 1955 he had earned a master’s degree in Comparative Jurisprudence. Yamani, the son of a Qadi and the grandson of the Grand Mufti of Turkey had married Laila, an Iraqi woman in Brooklyn. Thereafter he had moved on to Harvard Law School where he had won a second master’s degree.
Returning to the Kingdom he had become an advisor to the government during the ‘troubled’ period when Kind Saud and Prince Faisal were vying for power; immediately demonstrating a priceless quality in any politician, that of adroitly not burning his boats with either of the competing factions. It had only been when Faisal became Crown Prince that Yamani — still in his early thirties — had replaced Abdullah Tariki, the fiery nationalist long-time Oil Minister and founding light of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), as the new Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources.
“Forgive me, my friend,” the younger man grimaced, “it seems to me that you and I must prepare ourselves and our principals for the shape of things to come.”
Two decades ago Roosevelt and Churchill had carved up the oil fields of the Middle and Near East like two ruthless Conquistadors of old. The United States got Arabia; the British Iran and a large slice of Iraq. After the Abadan Crisis of the early 1950s when Iran attempted to nationalise its oil fields and refineries the Eisenhower Administration had — via a CIA sponsored coup d’état had put the Shah back on the Peacock Throne in Tehran — and in a cynical quid pro quo ‘bought into’ the British ‘concession’ at Abadan. This latter ‘investment’ took the form participation in a so-called ‘Consortium for Iran’, a cartel set up at the bidding of the State Department comprising the World’s seven largest oil conglomerates.
Under Eisenhower’s Presidency the State Department concerned itself with practical ‘Realpolitik’ as opposed to the tenth grade version the Kennedy Administration had pursued up to, during and after the October War.
The ‘Seven Sisters’ had formalised and organised the World’s oil markets for the benefit of American, and by default, western industrial society. US Presidents rarely permit moral scruples to impinge on major foreign policy decisions; it was a lesson the British ought to have remembered before they allowed themselves to be suckered by the Kennedy Administration back in January.
Or perhaps, the British had not been ‘suckered’ at all, perhaps they had just wanted to avoid another war so badly they had not worried that they were being set up for another fall further down the line?
Now even the days of the ‘Seven Sisters’ were numbered. The ‘Seven Sisters’ — Anglo-Persian Oil, Gulf Oil, Aramco, Texaco, Royal Dutch Shell, Standard Oil of New Jersey, and the Standard Oil Company of New York — still controlled ninety percent of the World’s somewhat diminished post-October war oil industry; although for how much longer was a moot point. It was one thing for the Kennedy Administration to carry on behaving as if Arabian oil was American oil; here in Dhahran the facts on the ground spoke to the increasing ambivalence of the Saudis towards their former overlords.
Having risen in rebellion against the dead hand of the Ottomans and later shrugged off the attentions of a waning British Empire, the Kingdom had never been at ease sheltering in the long shadow of the new American Imperium. After the October War the Kennedy Administration had mistakenly taken the allegiance of the Kingdom as a given. Who else was going to buy the Saudis’ oil? Who else was capable of guaranteeing the territorial integrity of Arabia? Hell, in the new post-war World the United States did not even have to base significant military forces — or any forces at all — in the Region; it was sufficient just for Saudi Arabia’s neighbours to know that the World’s last nuclear superpower stood behind the Kingdom. The air bases had been mothballed, massive emergency war stores depots stocked to overflowing at nearby Damman and in the desert at Jeddah, and outside Riyadh— just in case of need — and all bar a couple of hundred logistics troops, military ‘caretakers’, had gone home.