The United States’ quest for domination of the world’s petrol reserves certainly did not begin with the 1991 Persian Gulf War or the subsequent 2003 invasion of Iraq. While Iraq and the war on terror have dominated the headlines, the U.S. government and American corporate interests have long been quietly engaged in a parallel campaign to secure another major prize, this one located on the territory of what was once the Soviet Union: the Caspian Sea, which is believed to house well over 100 billion barrels of oil.1 After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Washington and its allies saw an opportunity to snatch one of the great deposits of valuable natural resources from Moscow’s grip. Multinational oil giants swooped in like vultures as the United States and its allies moved quickly to shore up the repressive regimes of the littoral ex-Soviet republics of the Caspian region. Unocal spent much of the 1990s trying to run a pipeline from Tajikistan through Afghanistan, a project on which Erik Prince’s friend (and Blackwater’s lobbyist) Paul Behrends had worked, but there was also great interest in the nations of Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, as well as the strategically important Republic of Georgia. While the route from Tajikistan proved very complicated, it was by no means the only one being explored by Big Oil, the White House, and a powerful cast of political players from past U.S. administrations.
Complicating a swift U.S. domination of the landlocked resources of the Caspian was the fact that two powerful nations—Russia and Iran—also border the sea and viewed the U.S. incursion into the area as a hostile threat. By 1997, a powerful U.S. consortium was hard at work exploring multiple ways to get to the Caspian resources. “American oil companies—including Amoco, Unocal, Exxon, Pennzoil—have invested billions of dollars in Azerbaijan and plan to invest billions more. As a result, they have developed a strongly pro-Azerbaijan position,” reported New York Times correspondent Stephen Kinzer in a dispatch from Azerbaijan. “The list of private American citizens who are seeking to make money from Azerbaijani oil or to encourage investment here reads like a roster of the national security establishment. Among the most prominent names are former Secretaries of State Henry A. Kissinger and James A. Baker 3d, former Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, former Senator and Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen, former White House chief of staff John H. Sununu, and two former national security advisers, Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski.”2
While the Clinton administration worked feverishly to secure Caspian resources, hosting Azerbaijan’s president at the White House for a two-hour meeting in August 1997 and courting his cooperation,3 it was not until the Bush administration took power that these onetime “pipe dreams” became a reality. In May 2001, Dick Cheney’s energy task force estimated that proven oil reserves in Azerbaijan’s and Kazakhstan’s sectors of the Caspian alone equaled “about 20 billion barrels, a little more than the North Sea and slightly less than the United States.”4 The Cheney group estimated that if the United States could get a major pipeline flowing west from the Caspian Sea—away from Moscow’s control—daily exports from the Caspian to world markets could go as high as 2.6 million barrels per day by 2005, “as the United States works closely with private companies and countries in the region to develop commercially viable export routes.”5 By contrast, in 2005 Iran exported 2.6 million barrels of oil per day, Venezuela 2.2, Kuwait 2.3, Nigeria 2.3, and Iraq 1.3.6
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, getting at the Caspian region’s oil had proved extremely difficult for Washington. Dating back to the Clinton administration, the United States and its allies envisioned a plan wherein Washington would essentially prop up the repressive regime in Azerbaijan and establish a state-of-the-art oil exploitation operation off the coast of the Azerbaijani capital, Baku, a peninsula that juts into the western Caspian. The oil would then flow through a massive pipeline stretching from Baku to Tbilisi, Georgia, through Turkey to the Mediterranean port city of Ceyhan. From there, the Caspian oil could be easily transported to Western markets. The project would mean an end to Moscow’s de facto monopoly on transporting Caspian oil, while at the same time providing Washington with an unparalleled opportunity to exert its influence in the ex-Soviet territories. When the project began in 1994, some analysts celebrated it as a “new Persian Gulf”; estimates projected as much as 230 billion barrels of oil in the region—eight times the proven U.S. reserves.7
During the latter years of Clinton’s tenure, however, the project came to be viewed as a white elephant likely to fail. The Caspian countries were governed by corrupt, unstable regimes that remained under Moscow’s sway despite their nominal independence. The pipeline would be extremely costly and vulnerable to sabotage. To top it off, early Western explorations in the Caspian turned up estimates of the sea’s potential resources far more modest than previous projections.8 While the United States remained committed to tapping the Caspian, the program moved forward at a slow pace. That changed when Bush took office and oil executives were welcomed into the White House like cousins at a family reunion. By September 2002, construction on the massive eleven-hundred-mile Caspian pipeline was under way. The BBC described it as a project that U.S. officials favored because it would “weaken Russia’s stranglehold on regional pipeline network and leave Iran on the sidelines.”9
A potential problem for the project lay in what the White House saw as the dangerous geography of the neighborhood—located not far from Chechnya and Iran. The Bush administration, therefore, made a number of moves that would result in at least one regime change in the region and the deployment of forces from Blackwater and other U.S. war-servicing firms to protect what would be one of Washington’s most ambitious power grabs on former Soviet territory.
In 2003, the Bush administration helped overthrow the government of a longtime U.S. ally, President Eduard Shevardnadze of Georgia. Once considered Washington’s closest strategic partner in the region and affectionately referred to as “Shevy-Chevy” by U.S. officials like James Baker, Shevardnadze had fallen fast out of favor with the administration of George W. Bush, as Shevardnadze began increasingly doing business with Moscow after years of U.S. patronage.10 Among his sins: granting new drilling and pipeline concessions to Russian firms and obstructing Washington’s grand Caspian pipeline plan. Soon after those transgressions, he was forced to resign in November 2003 as the so-called Rose Revolution brought to power a more staunchly pro-U.S. regime. The first telephone call the new acting president, Nino Burdzhanadze, made when she took over from Shevardnadze was to oil giant BP to “assure them the pipeline would be OK.”11 Just prior to taking power in Georgia, the new U.S.-backed leader, Mikhail Saakashvili, announced, “All strategic contracts in Georgia, especially the contract for the Caspian pipeline, are a matter of survival for the Georgian state.”12 That regime change resulted in the closure of Russian bases in Georgia and an increase in U.S. military aid to the country. In early 2004, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld deployed private military contractors from the Washington firm Cubic on a three-year $15 million contract to Georgia “to equip and advise the former Soviet republic’s crumbling military, embellishing an eastward expansion that has enraged Moscow,” reported London’s Guardian. “A Georgian security official said the Cubic team would also improve protection of the pipeline that will take Caspian oil from Baku to Turkey through Georgia. Georgia has already expressed its gratitude by agreeing to send 500 troops to Iraq.”13