by James Philip
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.
Six months ago the deal had suited the Saudi ruling family and the bean counters at the Pentagon. However, what the ‘masterminds’ back in Washington had not told the Saudis was that when the USS Independence – the US Navy’s ‘guard ship’ in the Indian Ocean - went back to Norfolk, Virginia for a twelve month refit and overhaul, she would be taking her powerful escorting task force with her and she was not coming back. To the Saudis, who viewed the presence of a powerful American naval presence in the Indian Ocean as incontrovertible evidence of the US’s ongoing commitment to the region’s security, the discover that within weeks of redefining its pact with the Kennedy Administration the US Government had in effect, reneged, on its contract with the Kingdom was so extraordinary that men like Yamani could still hardly believe it.
American soldiers and airmen on the ground in the Kingdom had been both an irritant and a unifying force. Many Saudis had viewed the ‘foreign troops’ as infidel interlopers but contrarily, felt safer for having them around. In their absence the tribal tensions and religious fault lines within Saudi society had begun again to seek expression, sorely exacerbated by the fact there was no longer an insatiable market for seven-tenths of the oil the Kingdom now had to export the ‘long way’ around the Cape of Good Hope to the Americas, or across the Southern Ocean to Australasia.
The American and European post-1945 boom had been fuelled by Saudi and Iranian oil but now there was no longer an ever thirstier, European economic miracle guzzling hydro-carbons like there was no tomorrow. Over fifty percent of the whole global oil market had disappeared overnight in October 1962, and the price of crude at the well head was stubbornly stuck at significantly below one-third of its pre-war level. America now slaked b
etween eighty and ninety percent of its thirst for oil from its own resources and those of nearby client states like Venezuela. The British, lacking credit lines within the Kingdom now relied wholly on the bottomless well of Abadan to feed their recovering industries and to heat their hearths. Last year the shortage of tankers and Nasser’s closure of the Suez Canal had, for several months stopped them assuaging their thirst for Mesopotamian black gold. Now that the British had completed their epic Operation Manna exercise – bringing every United Kingdom registered ship back under Royal Navy control and requisitioning and seizing every ‘stateless’ cargo ship on the high seas – the conveyor belt of tankers linking the British Isles to the oilfields of Persia via the Cape had been restored, further depressing the price of Saudi oil on the open market.
Where previously it had threatened to flood in, western gold now only dripped and trickled into Arabia; the Kingdom’s long-term dream of being the World’s banker, of building a great new modern Caliphate to rival that of the Safavids, of being once again the seat of a re-born Islamic empire now seemed vaingloriously hollow.
Thomas Barger was not a man who readily embraced apocalyptic notions of change and the resulting chaos; but he could not but be painfully aware of how tenuous his position and that of his company might become in the next few days and weeks. The mantra that applied was that nothing lasts forever, and in the words of John Maynard Keynes, ‘in the long run we are all dead’. In many ways he was astonished that the pre-war status quo had survived so long; and that even now the post-1945 settlement under which the British and the Americans had carved up the oil fields of Arabia, Mesopotamia and the Near East remained, albeit not for much longer, in force. True, there had been hiccups a plenty in the last few years.
“It goes without saying,” Yamani decided, “that in the current situation the Kingdom must seek certain assurances from President Kennedy. If that is, the current relationship between our countries is to continue. But,” again he was a little apologetic, “clearly, if the United States is unable or unwilling to guarantee the sovereignty and the inviolability of our territorial borders, then I am sure you will understand that the Kingdom may be forced to explore other options?”
The Chief Executive Officer of Aramco nodded.
He understood Yamani’s threat perfectly.
The younger man had gone out of his way not to remind him that the only significant ‘foreign’ military forces ‘on the ground’ in the region were British and Australian, based mainly in Aden, Oman and at Abadan. It was common knowledge – probably because the British wanted it to be so – that the garrisons at Abadan and elsewhere had recently been reinforced by units withdrawn from Borneo, and armoured vehicles, including an unknown number of the latest Mark II version of the formidable Centurion tank, destined at the time of the October War for delivery to India, and at least two full strength Australian mechanised infantry battalions. In addition the Royal Navy maintained a presence of at least two destroyers or frigates in the Persian Gulf and a force of smaller ships, mainly minesweepers and patrol boats at Aden and elsewhere around the Arabian Peninsula. At Abadan the RAF had stationed a squadron of Hawker Hunter jet fighters and a flight of ‘nuclear capable’ Canberra bombers. It was also known that the refinery complex on Abadan Island was protected by sophisticated Bristol Bloodhound long-range surface-to-air missiles. Moreover, British troops had been actively combating communist insurgents in Oman and the Yemen, patrolling the southern Kuwaiti borders with the Kingdom, and had based ‘tripwire’ contingents in camps in and around Basra in Iraq. The biggest British force was always at or around Abadan; and at its southern analogue, Aden. In the absence of US forces, the Royal Saudi Army and Air Force, equipped with small quantities of modern American and British equipment but still in the main reliant on outdated ‘hand me downs’, were probably a match for the relatively small British and Commonwealth forces in the area but, and it was an unquantifiable ‘but’, since the October War the Saudi regime tacitly recognised that if the British ever felt that their vital Abadan oil lifeline was under threat it was inevitable that there would be another, very one-sided, nuclear war.
Yamani sucked his teeth thoughtfully.
Whereas, the Kennedy Administration had offered its ‘friends in the Middle East’ words of comfort; the British had sent two V-Bombers and unofficially re-opened ‘military channels’ of communication with the Kingdom. That was one of the numerous advantages of so many minor sons of the Saudi ruling elite having been educated at English public schools and having been trained at Sandhurst. Friendships had been forged that were now worth ten times more than the ‘supportive’ words of an American President who had behaved as if the Kingdom did not exist for the last eighteen months.
“It is a matter of trust,” Yamani said, breaking the silence which had descended.
Thomas Barger was a man schooled by a life in the desert, and long acquaintance with unforgiving Bedouin logic.
“This I understand,” he acknowledged. “I give you my word that I will attempt again to communicate the sincere concerns of Crown Prince Faisal and of course, of Kind Saud, to my people in America.”
Chapter 3
Monday 13th April 1964
Corpus Christi College, Oxford, England
Margaret Thatcher had been working through her papers since six o’clock that morning. Just because the country was at war there was no excuse to ignore the normal ‘documentary traffic’ which came through her private office. Nor was she about to excuse herself in any way from carrying out her duties on account of the ongoing pain from the injuries she had suffered a week ago at Brize Norton.
While she sat at her desk she had eased her left arm out of its clumsy sling, less inconvenienced by the nagging ache in her shoulder than she was by the constant, stabbing, jarring fingers of flame that periodically exploded from her lower spine. Her doctors said there was ‘nothing to worry about in the x-rays’ and that she had ‘just badly twisted a large group of muscles which were now protesting’. They had strapped her up in a makeshift corset that made her sit upright like a manikin. Her dislocated shoulder had been ‘popped’ back into place shortly after she and Her Majesty had been rescued from the wrecked Royal Rolls-Royce.
Margaret Thatcher had visited the Queen at Woodstock yesterday evening and found her monarch much cheered by the company of her consort Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh whom, after her Prime Minister’s intersession, the RAF had flown south from his hospital bed in Scotland despite the vociferous objections of his doctors. Although the Duke of Edinburgh was still wheelchair bound he was itching for the fight and every word that passed his lips threatened to prompt a smile from his temporarily incapacitated wife.
The events of a week ago hung like a grim pall over Oxford.
The Prime Minister relived the nightmare at RAF Brize Norton every time she shut her eyes.
When the speculatively launched Mark XM41 Redeye Block I shoulder-launched surface-to-air missile had detonated on impact with the starboard outer Pratt and Whitney JT4A turbojet, of the US Air Force Douglas DC-8 carrying the Acting Chief of Staff of the US Army and Commander-in-Chief designate of all Allied Forces in Europe and his staff; the Prime Ministerial bodyguard, and the men of the Royal ‘protection squad’ had acted as one to ‘guard’ their charges. Margaret Thatcher’s Royal Marines and the Queen’s protectors, drawn from the Black Watch, had carried the two women to, and not to put too fine a point on it ‘thrown’ them into the only available remotely safe place on the exposed tarmac expanse of RAF Brize Norton; the nearby Royal armoured Rolls-Royce. Everything had happened so fast neither woman actually recollected how or when their numerous injuries had subsequently occurred. Two members of the Black Watch and two Royal Marines had fallen on the two women to shield them with their bodies, the stricken jetliner had crashed literally yards away, and as the disintegrating aircraft had cart-wheeled past a giant ball of burning aviation fuel had briefly enveloped the vehicle. It later transpired that the
Rolls-Royce had been struck by and violently tipped onto its roof by the impact of a detached section of the undercarriage of the downed DC-8.
General Harold Keith ‘Johnny’ Johnson – a survivor of the Bataan Death March and a hero of the Korean War – and everybody else onboard the US Air Force plane struck by the missile fired by two Irish Republican Army men had perished in the crash. As had seventeen men on the ground including thus far, eight Royal Marines of the ‘AWP’; members of the so-called ‘Angry Widow’s Praetorians’, the name the Royal Marines of Margaret Thatcher’s personal bodyguard had proudly adopted amongst themselves. Three of her faithful AWPs had died lingering deaths from horrific burns in the last two days, and the new commander of the detachment had reported to her earlier that morning that another man was ‘not long for this world’.
The shooting down of two aircraft; General Johnson’s DC-8 at RAF Brize Norton, and Flight 616, an RAF Comet at Cheltenham had come as sickening body blows to Margaret Thatcher and her government. On board Flight 616 returning from Malta had been the First Sea Lord, Sir David Luce, several senior staff officers, twenty-six seriously injured service personnel and civilians, their eight attendant nurses, and the Soviet code books and cipher equipment seized from the captured Turkish destroyer Mareşal Fevzi Çakmak after the Battle of Malta.
The IRA atrocities had been no less unnerving to the members of the United States Presidential delegation which had flown to England to discuss the delayed ratification of the new US-UK Mutual Defence Agreement – or more accurately, non-ratification - and to discuss the way forward in the Mediterranean.
What made the atrocities at Brize Norton and Cheltenham all the more soul destroying was that in the last week it had become apparent that contrary to the Prime Minister’s hopes and expectations, Jack Kennedy had decided to come to England not to embrace the transatlantic alliance but to finesse its public downgrading for his own domestic political reasons.
