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 between 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