by Robert Baer
World War II, in a sense, brought Saudi Arabia into the world. Britain and Germany both vied for the kingdom’s support, the Germans in part to use the peninsula as a back door for attacking Russia through its underside on the northern border of Iran. Officially neutral, the king favored the British, not from any long-standing love but because Britain and its colonies remained Saudi Arabia’s principal food source.
Saudi oil, too, came to assume ever greater importance as other sources of petroleum were cut off during the war. The Japanese invasion and occupation of Burma and Indonesia closed two critical sources. After never extracting more than 5.1 million barrels of oil annually through its first six years, Aramco ramped up to 7.8 million barrels in 1944 and nearly tripled to 21.3 million barrels in 1945. By then Saudi oil had become vital to the Allied cause.
Despite the kingdom’s newfound - and largely unsought - importance on the global stage, it wasn’t until February 14, 1945, that King Sa’ud, then in his mid-sixties, met his first Western head of state: Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Roosevelt had been courting Ibn Sa’ud for several years, and not merely to secure oil for the war effort. FDR had his eye on the strategic value of the vast Saudi reserves for the postwar years, and he was well aware that he would have to overcome British dominance in the Middle East if he was going to make the Saudis America’s new best friend in the Islamic world. On February 8, 1943, Standard Oil of California had written to the secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes, encouraging the Roosevelt administration to counter British influence by bringing Saudi Arabia under the umbrella of American lend-lease assistance. Ten days later, Assistant Secretary of State Edward Stettinius declared the kingdom of vital interest to the United States and extended direct and indirect aid that would eventually amount to almost $100 million.
Until the war, the American ambassador to Cairo had borne responsibility for the Saudi kingdom as well, but even before the lend-lease deal, the Saudis had been given their own chargé d’affaires, stationed in Jeddah. (From 1944 to 1946, the post was held by William Eddy, a onetime intelligence officer and experienced Arabist. In what would become the great tradition of the U.S.-Saudi relationship, Eddy would go on the oil dole after the war as a consultant to Aramco.)
Roosevelt sent his own personal envoy to Saudi Arabia in the spring of 1943. In the fall, the Saudis responded with two delegations. First Crown Prince Sa’ud and later Prince Faysal and his brother Khalid visited the United States, where they met the president and key members of Congress and the administration. The crown prince stayed for a month, with all the trappings of a state visit.
Just as the Saudis were leaving the capital, a group of American geologists was handing Washington a report on the future of oil. They predicted that the center of extraction would shift from Mexico and the Caribbean to the Persian Gulf region. Reserves there were far greater. Gulf oil wells were up to thirty times more productive than the average wells in Latin America and up to 150 times more productive than average wells in the U.S. And the proximity of the Gulf made transportation cheap, or would make it cheap once an oil infrastructure had been put in place. In the meantime, the fragile Saudi economy had gone into the tank. The lend-lease program was slow in arriving, and a relative trickle when it did. Muslim pilgrims fulfilling their obligation to visit Mecca provided the bulk of the country’s prewar revenues. Fighting in both the Pacific and European theaters had severely curtailed that and cut off most of the kingdom’s trade with the rest of the world.
In a February 7, 1944, telegram from Dhahran to his corporate masters in the States, SOCAL’s Floyd Ohliger wrote, “food situation… regarded greatest urgency by his majesty as starvation conditions becoming widespread.” A government warehouse in Jubail had about two thousand tons of foodstuffs for Riyadh, but government transportation was on the verge of collapse, “although some dates going from Hofuf by camel.” SOCAL could help, Ohliger wired, but only by delaying construction on the vital oil terminal at Ras Tanura.
In January 1945, in a top-secret memorandum to then Assistant Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Wallace Murray, head of the Office of Near Eastern and African Affairs, provided a “description of the character and extent of the American national interest in Saudi Arabia, together with an analysis of the situation which makes it necessary for this government to consider what positive steps it must take immediately in order to afford adequate protection to this interest.”
The United States wasn’t alone, Murray noted, in having an acute interest in the kingdom and its oil. “If the Saudi Arabian economy should break down and political disintegration ensue, there is a danger that either Great Britain or Soviet Russia would attempt to move into Saudi Arabia to preserve order and thus prevent the other from doing so. Such a development in a country strategically located and rich in oil as is Saudi Arabia might well constitute a causi belli threatening the peace of the world.”
The first priority of American policy, Murray argued, should be to safeguard and develop “the vast oil resources of Saudi Arabia, now in American hands under a concession held by American nationals.” The memo doesn’t envision the U.S. becoming the Saudi’s primary petroleum customer; that would come later. The expectation was that the Western Hemisphere would continue to be largely petroleum self-sufficient. But by filling Europe’s postwar oil appetite with Saudi oil, instead of oil from Venezuela, Mexico, and elsewhere in the Caribbean Basin, the United States could preserve its region’s resources and maintain a reserve it could fall back on in times of military emergency.
Of more pressing importance, Murray wrote, “the military authorities urgently desire certain facilities in Saudi Arabia for the prosecution of the war, such as the right to construct military airfields and flight privileges for military aircraft en route to the Pacific war theater… Thus far King Ibn Saud has declined to grant those facilities because of British objections, believed to arise from postwar political considerations.”
Since 1940 Great Britain had pumped nearly $40 million into Saudi Arabia, to maintain stability and heighten its influence there. American lend-lease aid to the kingdom had been about $13 million, with another $13.4 million coming in the form of advances from the Arabian American Oil Company. To counter British influence and keep the Soviets at bay, Murray, who would become U.S. ambassador to Iran at war’s end, recommended as much as $57 million in additional U.S. aid over the next five years. Otherwise, some other nation “might attain… a position in Saudi Arabia inimical to our national interest there.”
In an enclosed letter dated December 11, 1944, and also stamped “top secret,” Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal carried the argument still further:
The prestige and hence the influence of the United States is in part related to the wealth of the Government and its nationals in terms of oil resources, foreign as well as domestic. It is assumed, therefore, that the bargaining power of the United States in international conferences involving vital materials like oil and such problems as aviation, shipping, island bases, and international security agreements relating to the disposition of armed forces and facilities will depend in some degree upon the retention by the United States of such oil reserves… Under these circumstances, it is patently in the navy’s interest that no part of the national wealth, as represented by the present holdings of foreign oil reserves by American nationals, be lost at this time. Indeed, the active expansion of such holdings is very much to be desired.
The United States did have one great advantage with Saudi Arabia. Ibn Sa’ud had spent much of his life fighting tooth and nail to assemble his kingdom. He didn’t want to cede control to a nation such as Great Britain, with a long colonial past and a proven appetite for interfering in the region. Confined by its own geography and defined for much of its existence by its isolationism, the United States seemed a better and safer choice for a backward kingdom just finding its feet in global matters.
For the Saudis, the question was how to approach the United States. In a letter d
elivered to the American minister at Jedda for transmittal to Roosevelt, Ibn Sa’ud and his ministers put forth their case with delicacy and remarkable coyness:
When the King sees the great nation of America content to have its economic activity in Arabia reduced and defined by its ally, Britain, America in turn will surely understand that Saudi Arabia may be excused if it yields to the same constraint from the same source, not merely to please an ally, but to survive. Without arms or resources, Saudi Arabia must not reject the hand that measures its food and drink.
Unwilling as he is to entertain the thought, the King cannot but consider the possibility that American may lose interest in his distant land, after the war, as she has retired to domestic preoccupations after other wars…
The Saudi Arabian government therefore inquires whether there is an exit for our two nations from this confinement.
Who was courting whom? Ibn Sa’ud had pulled all the right strings.
BY FEBRUARY 1945, it was time for the two leaders to meet. Already in the Mediterranean to discuss reparations and the possible postwar dismemberment of Germany with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin, Roosevelt steamed to the Great Bitter Lake in the Suez Canal after the Yalta Conference closed. On February 12 he met with Farouk I of Egypt aboard the U.S.S. Quincy, which had carried the president all the way from Norfolk, Virginia. Ethiopia’s Haile Selaisse followed the next day. Meanwhile, at Jeddah on the Red Sea, Ibn Sa’ud and his party were boarding the U.S.S. Murphy, the first American warship to make port in Saudi waters, and setting sail for the Great Bitter Lake. On the fourteenth, the Saudi king came aboard the Quincy.
To accommodate Ibn Sa’ud, the ship’s crew covered the bow with a large tent and set out a decorative chair and an assortment of rugs and seating cushions for the king and his traveling party. In accordance with Muslim custom, a live sheep was slaughtered daily on board and prepared for his meal. At a dinner thrown for officers and crewmen, the king spoke through an interpreter of his own military conquests. U.S. Navy Captain John Keating recalled Ibn Sa’ud quoting from the Qur’an: “First I am a warrior: Only then am I a king.” At six foot four, he looked every bit the warrior.
Away from the festivities, aides showed Ibn Sa’ud newsreels that glorified U.S. military operations. The message was clear: If you need protection from your enemies, who better to have on your side than the world’s preeminent military power? The reverse message - if you want oil in your future, who better to have on your side than Saudi Arabia? - didn’t need asking.
In their talks aboard the Quincy, Franklin Roosevelt and Ibn Sa’ud put their common seal on many arrangements already in the works. America would have access to Saudi ports. It could construct the military air bases on Saudi soil, albeit with a lease limited to five years. Equally important, Aramco, dominated by SOCAL and other American oil companies, could begin building the Trans-Arabian pipeline to the Mediterranean. Roosevelt had hoped to gain the king’s support for a Jewish state in the Middle East, but Ibn Sa’ud argued that it was the Germans, not the Arabs, who had harmed the Jews; and thus the Germans, not the Arabs, who should pay. Roosevelt ended up promising the Saudi king that the United States would consult equally with Jews and Arabs over any change in U.S. policy toward Palestine. He also vowed that America would not seek to occupy Saudi soil as the British had occupied so many of Saudi Arabia’s neighboring countries. The latter point was key: Winston Churchill rushed to meet with Ibn Sa’ud as soon as he learned that Roosevelt had done so, but he was too late. The deal had been cut.
To commemorate the meeting, the two leaders parted with an exchange of gifts: a sheik’s robe and solid-gold knife for Roosevelt, and harem outfits for wife Eleanor and their daughter, Anna, who had accompanied the president from Norfolk. FDR presented Ibn Sa’ud with a Douglas two-prop plane, to be delivered later, and an exact replica of his own wheelchair. The king, who suffered from an old leg wound, took to the chair immediately and rarely left it except to sleep, until his death in 1953 of obesity, lack of exercise, and general decrepitude.
Contemporary historians and other commentators tended to treat the meeting as an aside, and even modern historians are apt to give it short shrift. Yalta is where the action was. The war was winding down. Europe needed to be rebuilt; Germany and Japan, to be shaped into pacifist nations. But it was on the Quincy, not at Yalta, that the energy cornerstone of America’s postwar industrial machine was laid.
Heavily invested in Iran and elsewhere, British and British-Dutch oil interests would continue to dominate the Middle Eastern trade in the years immediately following the war, but as the Saudi-U.S. relationship took root and spread, and as Saudi oil production grew - from 21.3 million barrels extracted in 1945 to 142.9 million in 1948 and over 300 million by 1952 - all that would change.
With the United States, the Saudis had protection against Egypt, against their ancient enemies in Jordan, against the Shi’a and the Iranians and all the other intrigue and danger of the Arab world. With the Saudis, the U.S. broke European hegemony in the Middle East and set up a bulwark against communist influence in the area. Everything that would come to define the U.S.-Saudi relationship was there from the beginning: oil diplomacy, the intertwining of government and corporate influences, the intermingling of public and private interests. The only thing missing was excessive greed, and that would take care of itself. The balance of global industrial-oil would have two clear termini: the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. People at either end would grow rich beyond all reckoning; and the second leg of the triangle that connects money and power, Islam and Christianity, terrorism and nationalism, would be complete.
THE FIRST LEG of that triangle had been set in stone two centuries earlier when Muhammad ibn ‘Abd-al-Wahhab was expelled from the desert oasis town at Al ‘Uyaynah, northwest of Riyadh.
Born at Al ‘Uyaynah in 1703 or 1704, Muhammad was said to have learned the Qur’an by heart by the time he was ten years old. At twelve, he entered into a marriage arranged by his father and set off on a pilgrimage to Mecca. Soon thereafter he was in Medina, studying under ‘Abdallah ibn Ibrahim ibn Saif, and from there he traveled far and wide, including to Kurdistan, Baghdad, and Basra, in what is now Iraq. In Basra, at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, ‘Abd-al-Wahhab began preaching the message that would resound through Saudi Arabia to this day.
Islam, ‘Abd-al-Wahhab told anyone who would listen, had lost its way. Islam was a monotheistic faith. The Qur’an strictly enjoined Muslims to refrain from imputing divine qualities to anyone other than Allah. Even the prophet Muhammad, founder of the faith, was only an ordinary man called by Allah to an extraordinary mission. Yet the evidence of polytheism was everywhere in the Muslim world: Muslims worshiped at the prophet’s tomb. They went on pilgrimages to mosques built atop the tombs of saints, offered sacrifices, and prayed for the saints’ intervention. Magicians, sorcerers, fortune-tellers - all ran afoul of the Qur’an. So did those who trusted their fate to talismans and amulets. ‘Abd-al-Wahhab even went so far as to order his followers to cut down the few trees that lived on the peninsula because they were worshiped by pagans.
Forced to leave Basra while he was still developing his message, ‘Abd-al-Wahhab returned to Al ‘Uyaynah and there launched his relentless puritan campaign. Islam could be made pure again, he preached, only by returning it to its purest form: the Qur’an and the Sunna, the code of conduct and acceptable views based on the prophet Muhammad’s life. Anything introduced since - any practices instituted more recently than three centuries after Allah had delivered the truth through his prophet - was bida, an abominable innovation. Ostentatious living, gaudily decorated mosques, and excesses of style were insults to Allah and distractions from his word. By way of correction, ‘Abd-al-Wahhab and his followers - the Wahhabis, as they became known - offered strict prescriptions that extended to the tiny details of everyday life. There was a Wahhabi way to sneeze, embrace, shake hands, yawn, kiss, dress, and so on. There was even a Wahhabi way of reinterpreting p
hysics; strict Wahhabis believe the world is flat. (If this begins to conjure images of the Taliban rule in Afghanistan, there’s a good reason.)
For the pagans who followed faiths established before Muhammad introduced the one true religion and the one and only god, there was no pity for their ignorance. For Muslims who refused to acknowledge the truth of ‘Abd-al-Wahhab’s teaching, there was jihad: holy war. The Wahhabis lived by the sword, and anybody who opposed them died by it.
Wahhabi intolerance finally got to be too much for ‘Uthman ibn Mu’ammar, the ruler of Al ‘Uyaynah. Facing opposition from his own people and fearing the wrath of powerful tribal chiefs - and unwilling, apparently, to have his guest put to death - ‘Uthman ordered ‘Abd-al-Wahhab to leave his territory but offered him the choice of destinations. And thus it was that sometime in the late 1730s or early 1740s, Wahhab walked forty miles down the Wadi Hanifah to Dar’iya, near present-day Riyadh, and made the acquaintance of its ruler, Muhammad ibn Sa’ud, great-great-great-great-grandfather of Ibn Sa’ud. It was a marriage made in heaven.
For nearly two hundred years, the Wahhabis, Muhammad ibn Sa’ud, and his descendants would wage war across the width and breath of the Arabian peninsula. In 1801 a Wahhabi raiding party sacked Karbala, the site of the tomb of the prophet’s grandson, Husayn, and one of Shi’a Islam’s most holy shrines. In the course of eight hours, the Wahhabis massacred some five thousand Shi’a and destroyed Husayn’s tomb, a horror and an insult the Shi’a have never forgiven.
It was the Ikwhan - the brethren of Wahhabi tribesmen - who helped Ibn Sa’ud capture the holy cities of Mecca and Medina; they battled the infidels, waged war against polytheists, humbled the idolators, and expelled the foreign opportunists and their lackeys until, after much back and forth, Ibn Sa’ud unified the conquests, named the vast bulk of Arabia after himself and his family, established Wahhabism as the state religion, and set out with his Wahhabi supporters to create an Islamic realm in the puritan tradition almost at the very moment that the discovery and exploitation of oil were on the verge of changing everything.
