by James Philip
Nobody had really known what was going on until the last twenty-four hours. And then the scale of the impending disaster had suddenly been writ plain in impossibly and frighteningly massive letters. The news was so bad that Barger had started to bypass the conversations he had been having with his people at the US Embassy in Riyadh and his contacts at the Consulate in Dhahran, and was getting his news exclusively from the BBC’s recently re-instituted World Service and Aramco’s internal wire service.
Red Army airborne troops had seized the Shah of Iran; put the bastard up against a wall with several terrified members of his harem – all young European women – and machine gunned him, and the unfortunate young women to pieces. Copies of the movie of this atrocity and of the nuking of Tehran had been sent to every foreign ministry in the Middle East! Soviet tanks had besieged Tabriz, and driven south as far as Bonab and Malekan; simultaneously airborne forces had taken the city of Urmia without a fight ensuring that the invaders controlled both the western and eastern banks of Lake Urmia. There was nothing to stop the invaders over-running the key city of Qoshachay on the Zarriné River; and thereafter the whole of Azerbaijani Iran opposite the old Turkish border and the - probably virtually undefended - north eastern border of Iraqi Kurdistan would soon be in Russian hands; from that bastion the Red Army could turn back into Iran, or fall upon Iraq, a sad country sliding into an inevitable sectarian civil war.
The fate of Tehran had – predictably – totally unhinged the regime in Baghdad whose first irrational response to the news from Iran had been to probe across the Iranian border north of Khorramshahr with elements of three armoured brigades, looking for advantage from the old enemy’s misfortune. After forty-eight hours of inconclusive fighting with a much smaller Iranian force a handful of British Army tanks sent north from Abadan had fallen on the flank of the leading Iraqi brigade, prompting the local Iranian defenders to mount a counter attack. Within hours the Iraqi invasion force had been routed, and was retreating in pell-mell confusion and panic, the survivors abandoning at least half their tanks on the eastern, Iranian side of the Arvand River as they melted back into the suburbs of Basra on the west bank. By all accounts there had since been widespread rioting and civil disorder in the city.
Farther north nobody actually knew for sure what was going on in Baghdad; other that was, than in the wake of the ‘disaster’ in the south there had been some sort of ‘palace coup’ and that there was sporadic fighting in the streets involving competing units of the Iraqi Army.
Thomas Barger would have despaired if he had believed it would have helped; but he was not that sort of man. Among his countrymen he was a rare animal, a Middle East ‘expert’, a man who had devoted much of his adult life to developing an affinity with, and an understanding off, that most ephemeral of things; the ‘Arab mind’. There was of course, no such thing as the ‘Arab mind’, any more than there was any such thing as an ‘American’ or a ‘British’ mind; what there was in reality was a regional culture that to most westerners, was as ancient as it was unfathomable. Therein lay the root cause of the majority of ‘western’ misconceptions about Arabia and the Middle East.
The Middle East was a jigsaw of feudal emirates, countries invented by the reckless – and criminally lazy - pens of European diplomats, religious hatreds, ethnic bigotry; an unholy farrago of proxies of past and present colonial overlords. The region had been a powder keg in Ottoman times; and then after the greater part of the World’s known easily extractable oil reserves had been discovered under its deserts and rocky fastnesses in the first half of the twentieth century, East and West had ruthlessly vied for the upper hand, weaponry had poured into the region, unspeakable despots had been propped up, and the region’s multiple fracture lines papered over. It was a miracle the whole Middle East had not imploded after the October War; the trouble was that anybody with eyes in his head could see that the day of reckoning had not been averted, merely delayed.
Today it seemed as if judgment day had not been delayed overlong.
Barger was an oil man, a businessman and he understood that at times like this diplomats were no better than flimflam men. The World had gone to Hell in a hand basket in the last week. The news from Malta had been bad enough – very nearly disastrous, in fact – but at least the British had held on until the Seventh Cavalry, in the shape of the US Navy had belatedly saved the day.
The repulse of the Soviet invasion force at Malta was the last of the good news. Hard on its heels had followed the reports of the atrocities perpetrated by the Irish Republican Army in England. After that who could blame the British for reacting as they had? Worse, in the Middle East the United States’ former clients had noted - with no little alarm and growing despondency - the feebleness and indecision with which the Kennedy Administration had responded and drawn their own lessons; none of which boded well for future Arab-US relations. The irresolution of the American response – bordering on ‘disinterest’ – was in stark contrast to the uncompromisingly belligerent line that the British had adopted following the Soviets’ ‘unilateral employment of a nuclear weapon against a civilian population’ in Tehran.
Every thirty minutes the BBC World Service broke into its normal programming to broadcast an unequivocal statement of intend that began: ‘The Soviet leadership is hereby given notice that any further use of nuclear weapons by it, its allies or its proxies will result in an all out strike by the United Kingdom against the forces of the Soviet Union and any surviving concentrations of population or industry within the former territories of the Soviet Union, or in any territories deemed to now be under Soviet control.’
The ninety second statement went on in a relentlessly similar vein and concluded: ‘RAF bombers stand ready at the end of their runways at four minutes notice to go to war. Other RAF bombers are airborne at this time ready to strike within minutes of the receipt of the order to attack!’
There had been no such unambiguous statement of intent from the Kennedy Administration.
The arrival of two ‘bombed up’ RAF Avro Vulcan V-Bombers and three transport aircraft carrying their spares and service crews at Dhahran yesterday afternoon had sent the Saudi government exactly the sort of signal that it had been waiting in vain for the Kennedy Administration to send it for much of the last week.
The Chief Executive Officer of the Arabian American Oil Company sighed and looked to his companion; whom he knew to be a gifted, westernized example of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s new generation of technocrats who understood exactly what the catastrophic events unfolding six hundred miles to the north portended.
“So,” the younger man remarked dryly in Arabic, subconsciously brushing his immaculately trimmed goatee with his right forefinger, “it seems that the World turns again, my friend?”
The first thing Thomas Barger had done after he jumped onto that rotting, dilapidated pier at Al Khobar in 1937 to set foot in what was then an impoverished, tribal backwater populated with still warring desert tribes, was to attempt to familiarise himself with the terrain and the basic customs of Arabia. The second thing he had done was to set about becoming fluent in Arabic; which over the last quarter of a century he had learned to speak like a native. This was no idle affectation, the Kingdom was his home; four of his children had been born in Saudi Arabia and many of his closest friends and practically all his most trusted lieutenants were Saudis.
“I think we must wait and see, your Excellency.”
The younger man nodded politely.
Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the thirty-three year old Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources whom westerners with no understanding of the Kingdom and little respect for its ancient mores and traditions, casually referred to as ‘Sheik’ Yamani, nodded thoughtfully. Like the older man he understood that regardless of their business, personal, or political agendas – which inevitably were radically different – the situation in Iran and Iraq was profoundly dangerous to absolutely everything they both held dear.
There was a knock a
t the door and two young men – Saudis on Thomas Barger’s staff entered and placed a coffee jug and cups and saucers on a low table set away from the Aramco CEO’s broad desk.
Presently, Barger and Yamani were alone again.
Today the quietness seemed somehow oppressive with shadows looming over their heads. It was a signature of the times that two such powerful men could feel so insecure on account of unforeseen events over which they had no control taking place many hundreds of miles away.
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, ass
ayer 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.
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.
