Chapter 38
The days when Thomas Barger, the President of the Arabian-American Oil Company (Aramco) might have felt uneasy facilitating a meeting between a British General and two senior Saudi ministers, were long gone. Notwithstanding he had spent half his life living and working in Saudi Arabia, Barger was as patriotic as the next man but business was business and his first loyalty was to the shareholders of his company, not to a United States government that was seemingly Hell-bent on wrecking US-Saudi relations for a generation and in the process, destroying practically everything he had achieved in his whole working life. Back ‘home’ there would be people, a lot of people, who were going to accuse him of having ‘gone native’; but if it was left unchallenged the Kennedy Administration’s one-eyed America First insanity guaranteed that the region containing something like sixty to seventy percent of the World’s known ‘recoverable’ oil reserves, was about to be plunged into decades of chaos.
The very idea of the Red Army lurking on the northern borders of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and dominating the northern shore of the Persian Gulf sent an icy shiver down Thomas Barger’s spine. Even if the Soviets did not immediately invade the oil rich north east of the Arabian Peninsula — the biggest oilfields were within only a few hours’ drive from the Iraqi border and less than twenty minutes flight time for a Red Air Force bomber — the Saudi regime, and almost certainly those of the sheikdoms and emirates along the southern shores of the Persian Gulf, not to mention Oman which commanded the approaches to the Gulf, would most likely fall.
And then what?
What would remain after the bloodletting was over?
Whereas, nobody in Philadelphia seemed to have thought about any of this; it was clear that the British had thought about it a lot. The trouble was that they needed men, bullets and the co-operation of the sons of the people they had betrayed at Versailles all those years ago, and in Arabia forty or fifty years was just a blink of the eye when it came to remembering old slights and the honour of settling blood feuds.
Today’s ‘conference’ was only possible because Thomas Barger — whom his Saudi ‘stakeholders’ and contacts regarded as part-Arab in exactly the way people back home suspected he was part-native — trusted him. Or rather, they trusted him to do whatever was best for Aramco, which was serendipitous because they recognised that what was good for Aramco was good for the Kingdom. Saudi Arabia was nothing, an arid impoverished wasteland without its oil.
The Kennedy Administration’s talk of ‘guaranteeing the territorial integrity of Arabia’ was meaningless. The United States had access to oilfields in South America and Indonesia, there was oil in Canada and Alaska as yet untapped and with the post-October War collapse in the price of crude oil, American industry and consumers alike were content to enjoy their ‘cheap gas’ for as long as the party lasted. America did not need Saudi oil at the moment and that fact trumped every other consideration.
The Kingdom had been facing bankruptcy before the Soviet invasion of Iran and Iraq; now it was looking into the abyss and the ruling Royal Family was beginning to ask itself when, not if, it would be swept away in a bloody palace revolt. In such a climate it was hardly surprising that Crown Prince Faisal had sent two of his younger, most ambitious ministers to parley in secret with the emissary of the former Imperial overlords.
Newly promoted Lieutenant-General Sir Michael Carver had risen to his feet, straightened and bowed his head first to thirty-six year old Prince Abdulaziz, the Minister of Defence and Aviation, and then to Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the thirty-three year old Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources.
The British officer was immaculately, elegantly attired in a lightweight grey civilian suit. Not that his non-military garb concealed for a single moment the soldier within. Thomas Barger had recognised in Carver exactly what he guessed his Saudi friends and business partners would instantly see; in the man’s patient, thoughtful presence there was none of the ignorant haughtiness of so many of his fellow countrymen, simply a respect for his surroundings and a lack of suspicion. Perhaps, here was a man that might, in some lights, be a tangible link back to the glory days of the Arab Revolt and the campaigns of Lawrence…
In Carver’s aloofness there was a quiet dignity that was highly respected in this land. His bearing might have been that of a scholar or priest, his measured movements suggestive of a man always deep in his thoughts, an aesthete, the most cerebral of warriors, a man who would not flinch to do what had to be done.
“No Egyptian soldier will step onto the soil of the Kingdom,” Sultan bin Abdulaziz asserted as he shook the Englishman’s hand. “Nasser is bent on a revolutionary course and has purged those sympathetic to the Kingdom’s cause in his own land.”
Thomas Berger translated fluently.
Michael Carver was a tall man at pains not to look down his aquiline, patrician nose at the Saudi Minister for Defence and Aviation. He nodded. Ideally, he would have placed the Egyptian armour ‘promised’ to him opposite the Syrian Desert of Southern Iraq but that had never been more than a staff college exercise, a hypothetical scenario. Only a small proportion of the Egyptian 1st and 3rd Armoured Divisions could be transported by sea from Suez around the Arabian Peninsula by sea in the next thirty days; by the end of June he might have a couple of disorganised, rag tag tank Egyptian regiments ready to move although they were unlikely to be in any sense anywhere near what a British Army tanker would consider ‘combat ready’.
Sir Thomas Harding-Grayson had been very specific about the nature of the game they were playing. Nasser and Sadat were not fools; they understood that their tanks were pieces on the regional chess board, no more or less. One fought wars not with the armies, air forces and navies one wished one had but with the ones one had to hand now. Nasser’s tanks were a statement of intent, once in theatre they ensured that Egypt would be engaged in the long term battle for the control of the Middle East, not a peripheral onlooker preoccupied with its local ambitions in Libya or its renewed ancient feud with Israel.
Most important of all; whatever happened the ‘deal’ ensured that Nasser was surgically removed from the Soviet orbit, forced to declare for the Western-led coalition against the invaders. This was a decision which would ring down the coming years regardless of what happened in the coming war.
Nor had it been lost on Michael Carver that the agreement Sir Thomas had initialled with Nasser had inextricably tied the United Kingdom to supporting, with nuclear weapons if it came to it, the region’s one potential unifying power.
Michael Carver glanced to Ahmed Zaki Yamani before returning his full attention to the Saudi Defence Minister.
“I am here because I am convinced that it is in the best interests of both our countries that, at the appropriate moment,” he waited while Thomas Barger translated before continuing. “That we fight our mutual enemy on Iraqi soil. I further believe that forces of the Royal Saudi Army and Air Force, bolstered by tanks, vehicles and munitions currently held in American ‘War Stores Depots’ within the Kingdom, supported by British armoured units and the RAF are capable of implementing such a strategy.”
Prince bin Abdulaziz’s eyes narrowed.