Yamani’s suite of offices in Riyadh was on the first floor of an unremarkable, buff-colored building, half way between the airport and the city center.
In the outer offices, male secretaries in white Arab robes shuffled slowly back and forth along a hallway decorated with large color photos of oil refineries and oil wells and the oilfields of the desert.
In the anteroom there were always at least a dozen people waiting to see the minister. Men in Arab dress and men in western business suits staring at the ceiling or looking at the floor or smoking cigarettes or just checking their watch, wondering how much longer Yamani would be.
His own office was magnificent, a huge, paneled corner suite where the center piece was his enormous French empire desk.
There was more French empire furniture scattered around - lots of chairs and tables - and large Arab couches too, covered with multicolored cushions the way the Arabs love multicolored cushions.
There were plenty of telephones that never seemed to stop ringing, a shortwave radio he talked on every now and then, and long sheets of telex printouts with oil prices from all over the world that piled up on his desk throughout the day.
As is always the custom in the Arab world, anybody who finally made it past the anteroom and got into his office was automatically offered sweet mint tea or cardamom coffee.
Drinking tea or coffee was something to do while Yamani juggled phone calls.
*****
In early November 1973, with the oil embargo in full swing and oil prices fixed at $5.12, a minor event took place that received little or no notice outside the oil world.
There was an auction sale of a single lot of Nigerian crude.
Even though the world shortfall, owing to the production cutbacks, was only something like 7 percent below the September pre-embargo levels, bidders at the auction let panic get the best of them.
The Nigerian crude was sold at $16.
When the Shah saw that, he decided to give that market a second test. Iran’s economy was in trouble. Foreign debt was overextended. He wanted to implement a very ambitious five-year development plan. He needed cash.
In early December Iran held an auction where prices hit $17.40.
Because he could see what was coming, Yamani urged his colleagues not to be influenced by the auction prices. He argued that to a large extent they reflected the effects of the oil embargo and the production cutbacks. He warned, “Since these measures are of a political nature, they should not have an economic effect.”
The Shah, however, had ideas of his own.
Three weeks later, ministers of the six Gulf member countries met in Tehran. The Shah took advantage of the reduction in output and the extreme nervousness of the market and announced to the ministers that he wanted to raise his government’s take to $14, which would put the price of oil at nearly $23 a barrel.
Yamani had no doubts that such a drastic hike would send the western economy into a tailspin. Sharp increases like that weren’t healthy for the producers either. On the other hand, the West could absorb less severe price increases, so he proposed that the price for Saudi Arabian Light, the OPEC market crude, be raised to no more than $7.50.
With the militants on his side, the Shah’s compromise position put the price of oil at around $12.
Yamani wanted to hold out, but he felt that, with the crisis at a head, a split now with other producers - especially the Arab producers - could endanger OPEC.
The Shah asked Yamani for an answer.
Getting up from the table, Yamani explained that he couldn’t take a decision without consulting the king. He excused himself, left the meeting and went to a phone. He put in a call but didn’t get through. So he tried again. Nothing. He tried a third time. Still nothing.
The Shah pressed him again for an answer.
After several more futile attempts at reaching Riyadh, Yamani was forced to second-guess what Faisal would have wanted.
“It was a very critical moment,” he remembers. “It was a decision I had to take very reluctantly. I was afraid the effects of such a price rise would be even more harmful than it turned out to be. But I didn’t know that then. I was afraid that such a severe rise in prices would create a major depression in the West. And I knew, as I have always said, that if the west went down, we would go down too.”
His choices were obvious. He could either hold out against the Shah and risk splitting OPEC into two camps, or he could go along with the Shah and try to bring prices down eventually.
He opted for the latter.
It was only when he returned home that he discovered Faisal would have been against the move if he’d been consulted.
Oil was now $11.65 a barrel. Prices had quadrupled in a matter of months.
At a press conference after the meeting, the Shah showed his colors as the leading price hawk in the Gulf. He proclaimed, “It will do western consumers good to learn to economize. Eventually all those children of well-to-do families who have plenty to eat at every meal, who have their own cars and who act almost as terrorists and throw bombs here and there, will have to rethink all these privileges of the advanced industrial world. And they will have to work harder.”
The Shah sounded disquietingly like a man with a grudge. Even if he didn’t come right out and say as much, a good part of his hostility was aimed directly at Yamani.
“The Saudis always got in the Shah’s way,” notes a US State Department observer. “Because he took his Peacock Throne so seriously, he would never publicly criticize a so-called friendly monarch. He wouldn’t go after Faisal, for instance. Especially Faisal. So he used Yamani as a whipping boy. Yamani was fair game for the Shah’s hostility towards the Saudis in general and King Faisal in particular.”
James Akins agrees. “Yes, the Shah did hate Yamani. There was a personal antipathy. But part of this was contrived. The Shah didn’t like to attack the Saudi government or attack the king. And so when the Saudis would take a position on oil prices, to keep the prices from going up for example, the Shah would then launch into a long attack, not on Saudi Arabia and definitely not on the king, but on Yamani.”
It’s the same story from Ian Seymour at the Middle East Economic Survey. “The Shah didn’t like Yamani?” He chuckles, “You’re putting it very mildly. Yamani was fronting for the Saudi regime and so he got the hammering from the Shah as the guy who was responsible because the Shah didn’t want to say Faisal or Khaled was responsible. He was putting the whole thing on Yamani. When he called Yamani a tool of the imperialists it was really just a way of saying, you’re not allowing Iran to get its way. If anybody was a tool of the imperialists it was the Shah. And sure he and Zaki had different ideas. What Yamani was saying was that Saudi Arabia was reserving its right to have a bit of the imperialist booty.”
When pressed, Yamani, ever the gentleman, couches his feelings in typical diplomacy. “I don’t know exactly how the Shah felt about me, but it was obvious that he didn’t necessarily like what I was doing. Then, too, it was also easier to criticize me than to criticize the Saudi royal family.”
Actually, while Yamani and the Shah had a definite adversarial relationship in public, especially where OPEC was concerned, it doesn’t seem to have been anywhere near as hostile in private.
In the 1960s, when the Shah was on his honeymoon at the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco, Yamani also happened to be staying there. Yamani spotted the Shah and his bride across the lobby one day but didn’t want to disturb them. Late that night, just as Yamani was falling asleep, his phone rang.
In a daze he heard someone on the other end say, “Zaki, it’s Reza.” It took him several seconds to realize who was calling.
The Shah wanted to know, “Why are you avoiding me? I saw you in the lobby today. Please dine with us tomorrow.”
Around the same time, on a trip to Tehran, Yamani tried to purchase some grape vines for his orchard in Taif. He was told that export of Iranian vines was forbidden. He wanted them badly but never mentioned that to anyone in the government, and certainly not to the Shah. He simply let the matter drop.
Thirteen years later, after an especially grueling OPEC meeting, a bunch of those vines was sent to him as a gift from the Shah. It seems the Shah had known all along and suddenly decided he wanted Yamani to have them.
*****
As prices shot up, oil was news and the story was covered from every angle.
An especially unique view came from the Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Jack Anderson. He believed that the Saudis, with their 100-year supply of oil, feared that if prices got too high it could destroy oil as a product before they could get rid of one-tenth of it.
He wrote, “In the maneuvering before the Tehran meeting, the Saudis and the new American Ambassador to Riyadh, Jim Akins, tried to get Kissinger to put pressure on the Shah, using US leverage as Iran’s arms supplier. But nothing came of it beyond a routine letter from Kissinger, which the Shah ignored, and the Nixon administration kept unsullied its record of never having used muscle to keep down foreign oil prices.”
When asked if that sounds accurate, Yamani is quick to say, “Yes. King Faisal asked Kissinger on several occasions to talk to the Shah. But this implies that Faisal did not know that Kissinger wanted a high price of oil. Because this is how you ultimately reduce your dependence on foreign oil. With a really high price you encourage exploration, you encourage development of alternative sources of energy and you gradually reduce your dependence on imported oil. That’s what Kissinger wanted. He was looking to reduce the Arabs’ power because the real power the Arab had was derived from oil. Kissinger wanted to take away that power. It takes some time, but it does not happen except through a high price of oil.”
That being the case, Kissinger and the Shah might both have had reasons to go for a higher price.
At least Hamed Zaheri, an Iraqi-born Iranian who spent a decade as OPEC’s press spokesman, is convinced that’s true.
“Iran wanted it to buy more arms. And in those days Nixon and Kissinger wanted to arm Iran. They wanted to have a strong Iran. The only way for Iran to get the money was by increasing oil prices. I have reason to believe that the bug was put into the Shah’s ear by Kissinger. Raise the price and buy the planes.”
So he, too, believes that the 1973 price increases were stage-managed by the Shah with the backing of the Americans. “But I believe there was another factor as well. After the Vietnam era, the US economy wasn’t functioning well, vis-a-vis the Japanese and the Germans. The only way to slow down the Japanese and the Germans was to increase the oil prices on which they were so dependent. It was the Shah and Kissinger who came up with that. Do you honestly believe the telephones didn’t work? No, the Iranian government started to play a game and somehow kept Yamani from getting through. It was to their benefit that he didn’t reach King Faisal in time. So they pulled the telephone plug. It was definitely a strategy which was well played by the Shah with the support of the Americans.”
Perhaps not as far-fetched an idea as it sounds, there is good reason to believe that King Faisal had serious reservations about Henry Kissinger.
In fact, Jim Akins insists, his apprehensions bordered on distrust. “Because Henry Kissinger lied to him. Before Kissinger first came out, Faisal was very apprehensive. I talked to the king at length and said, look, he’s the American foreign minister. He has a sense of history. He’ll be doing all the things that will advance America’s interests, not Israel’s interests. You can deal with him. I was probably more responsible than anybody else for getting a reasonable relationship between Kissinger and the king. Then Kissinger started playing fast and loose with the truth.”
At this point it’s only fair to explain that Akins and Kissinger have not remained the warmest of friends over the years.
That’s an understatement.
Akins was assigned to Saudi Arabia towards the end of 1973. But Akins didn’t play the game by Kissinger’s rules and Kissinger recalled him within a very short period.
By most accounts, the Akins-Kissinger clash was two-sided. Says a long-time Kissinger associate and close personal friend, “Jim thought he knew the Arabs better than Kissinger, better than anyone else, and when he disagreed with policy he didn’t always follow Henry’s directives. At the same time, Henry was always undercutting his ambassadors. He was a great one for that.”
So when it comes to speaking about Kissinger, Akins comments have to be put into a proper perspective.
As one of his fellow ambassadors suggests rather pointedly, “Jim Akins is sometimes very emotional for a Quaker.”
Furthermore, George Ballou contends that Akins is, “One of the most arrogant people you’ll ever meet. Anything you get from Akins, you’ve got to remember that Jim is carrying this grudge which has influenced him. He’s bright and aggressive. But he told me even before he went out there that he was going to get fired. That said, Henry Kissinger did lose credibility with the Arabs. The ‘73 war ended up with Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy. And the Arabs still feel they were done in by Kissinger. From their point of view, I think they were.”
According to Atkins, Kissinger’s mind operates the same way Metternich’s did. “Metternich was able to tell one story to the Emperor, another story to the King of Prussia, another story to the King of France and so on. By the time they compared notes, things had changed. Kissinger didn’t seem to understand that the world had changed since Metternich. He was not able to get away with it. People compared notes very quickly. The initial reaction was as Kissinger had calculated it. They thought, ‘We must be mistaken. The American foreign minister could not be lying to us.’ But very quickly they concluded that Kissinger was lying. By the time of King Faisal’s death, if Kissinger had said, ‘I guarantee that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow,’ the king would have said to his advisers, ‘We better wait and see.’”
John West, the former Governor of South Carolina and Jimmy Carter’s Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, says there’s a lot of truth in Akins’ appraisal of the Saudis’ feelings towards Kissinger.
“His method of operation was to tell each side what he thought they wanted to hear in a sufficiently clever way that they couldn’t actually say it was an outright lie. But none of the Arabs trusted him. They respected his capacity, but they didn’t trust him.”
Part of Kissinger’s problems with the Arabs, according to that long-time associate and close personal friend, was that Kissinger always remained as much a European as he was an American. “He never quite absorbed the American sense of discipline about telling the truth. For Americans, there is usually a very distinct line between the truth and a lie. For Europeans and the Arabs the distinctions can be less clear. Telling different things to different people goes against the grain with Americans. However, it isn’t necessarily viewed the same way by the Europeans or by the Arabs. I think Akins exaggerates a bit when he compares Kissinger to Metternich, although it’s certainly true to a degree. But, then, maybe Faisal just didn’t like Kissinger because he was a Jew.”
Yamani objects. “That had nothing to do with it.”
He confirms the fact that neither he nor Faisal was necessarily Kissinger’s biggest fan, but he insists he never heard the king say anything about Kissinger’s religion.
“Not at all. That wouldn’t have bothered Faisal and that never bothered me. You know, I respect intelligent people and Kissinger is extremely intelligent. You can see it in his eyes. Whether you have differing views with someone or not, when you are dealing with an intelligent person, you enjoy that. It becomes a challenge. I never felt that he was completely neutral. But that doesn’t mean I was worried about dealing with him, because, after all, he was the only person to deal with.”
On trip to Saudi Arabia in early 1975, Kissinger spent considerable time going through all the motions of diplomatic politesse, praising Faisal to his face. But when he returned to his hotel suite and was alone with his staff, he spent just as much effort referring to the king in extremely unkind terms.
The Secretary of State’s diatribe surfaced in a CIA report, suggesting that the room was bugged.
That unnamed long-time Kissinger associate and close personal friend finds the story amusing. “Kissinger thought it was fair game for the Americans and the Russians to bug people. And we all knew that the Saudis had hired experts to bug rooms. We had reason to believe that all the palaces were bugged. Probably still are.”
But here Yamani raises an eyebrow. “I really don’t know. It was not a normal practice during the time of Faisal to bug a hotel room like that. Kissinger’s comments could have been reported somehow, but I honestly don’t think the room would have been bugged. No, not during the time of Faisal.”
After Faisal?
He shrugs, “Could be.”
As for Akins’ comment that Kissinger played “fast and loose with the truth,” Yamani acknowledges, “Akins was in a position to know because he got the reports. I wasn’t involved in Kissinger’s discussions with the Egyptians, Syrians or the Iranians. But Akins told me several times that Kissinger had lied to the Arabs. He didn’t say it while he was the Ambassador because as such he was not in a position to say it. But we were told the same thing by many other people. Now, don’t forget that Faisal was extremely intelligent and sometimes I felt he could read minds. If he had discovered that Kissinger was lying to us, he never would have shown it. He was shrewd enough to play that game. Although it would have changed his attitude towards policy decisions. Yes, it definitely would have affected his thinking.”
It is therefore” just possible, Yamani suggests, that Kissinger’s attitude did serve to harden Faisal’s position on peace in the Middle East when the two men met for the final time.
It was in February 1975.
The Saudi Foreign Minister had just died, so Faisal asked that Yamani receive Kissinger on behalf of the government.
Yamani met the American at the airport and brought him to the king’s office. They talked as they rode into Riyadh and Yamani thought to himself that Kissinger seemed very tense.
It was Kissinger’s aim to see another disengagement agreement between the Israelis and the Egyptians.
But when he explained his plan in the king’s office, Faisal said no. He said the second agreement should be between the Israelis and the Syrians.
Kissinger tried to convince Faisal to let him go ahead and get this agreement between the Israelis and the Egyptians and after that, he promised he would go for an agreement between the Israelis and the Syrians.
Faisal said, “No. I will oppose that.”
Kissinger promised, “We will undertake to work very hard to see that an agreement between the Israelis and the Syrians take place immediately after this one.”
Again Faisal said, “No. I will oppose that. The second agreement must be between the Syrians and the Israelis.” The meeting went on like that for some time.
Kissinger kept trying to change Faisal’s mind.
Faisal would not budge.
Every time Kissinger spoke about a second agreement between the Egyptians and the Israelis, Faisal said, “I will oppose that.”
Yamani explains that Faisal was looking for an overall settlement and felt Kissinger’s plans were too limited. “Faisal understood that if you only solved the Egyptian problem, you would isolate the Egyptians from the Arab camp and the problem with the Syrians would remain. Of course, isolating the Egyptians from the Arab camp was what Kissinger wanted to do.”
When the meeting ended, Yamani took Kissinger back to the airport.
Yamani says Kissinger still seemed very nervous in the car. He kept saying, “Now we will not have a second agreement with the Egyptians.” He knew that as long as Faisal opposed the second agreement it would not go through. Egypt would never have signed it over Faisal’s opposition.
One month later, Faisal was assassinated.
And Kissinger got his agreement between Israel and Egypt.
This is not to suggest in any way that there’s a relationship between the two events. Although there was talk at one point that the CIA was behind Faisal’s assassination.
Yamani instantly shrugs off that idea. “You always hear all kinds of talk. But there has never been anything to substantiate that.”
Even James Akins is willing to stand up for Kissinger when it comes to that. “Henry Kissinger had absolutely no credibility in Saudi Arabia, or anywhere else in the Arab world, by the time of King Faisal’s death. But because the young murderer had just come from the United States where he had serious trouble with the police and was almost put in jail, the belief grew that he was recruited by the CIA and that Kissinger, or the CIA, was responsible for King Faisal’s death. I’m scarcely one to be defending Henry Kissinger, but this was one of the problems I had when I was out there. I still tell people that there is no truth whatsoever in that story. They think that because Kissinger thought Faisal had outlived his usefulness and as he could no longer manipulate him, he decided to get rid of him. This is one of the problems you have in dealing with the Arabs. They jump early to conclusions. They’re strongest in deductive reasoning and tend to think it equates to proof.”
That the Middle East situation is still so volatile, Yamani holds, goes straight back to Kissinger’s motives. “I think the important question is whether the Americans, under Kissinger, wanted an overall settlement or simply wanted to water down the fire, to reduce the heat of the situation and keep things pending until some, time in the future and there would be no settlement. That way Israel could continue its occupation of the territories taken in 1967 and annex them. These are my feelings and I think I share them with everybody who follows the problem of the Middle East.”
When Gerald Ford took over as President, Yamani says, nothing changed. Kissinger was still the architect of US foreign policy.
“I met with Ford the first time when he was Vice President in early 1974. He wasn’t necessarily well informed about the oil business. But then I never expected him to be very knowledgeable about oil. He was still only learning about the Middle East. The clever one in those days was William Simon (Energy Czar under Nixon, Secretary of the Treasury under Ford). He was a very hard-working man and we used to mix very well. I even stayed at his home in Washington. I remember waking up one morning early and looking down into the garden and Simon was sitting there with a huge stack of files, already working.”
By 1976, with Carter’s election to the White House, Kissinger was out. “We thought at the time that everything now depends on Israel’s attitude. If they were serious about peace, then Carter’s initiatives could be a step forward. If they were not serious, it would be a step backwards.”
The result of Carter’s efforts was the Camp David Agreements, a September 1978 accord between Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Menachem Begin. The decisions made at the presidential retreat in the Maryland mountains that autumn laid the foundations for a peace treaty which Egypt and Israel signed the following spring.
The world hoped it might work.
Yamani, ever the pragmatist, realized it couldn’t.
“Camp David was designed to isolate Egypt from the Arab world and weaken the Arabs’ united front. Israel could then relax and stay on the West Bank until some day when they could annex the territories and make them officially part of Israel.”
The only positive result he can see that came out of the Camp David talks was the return of Sinai. “But nothing else. I think history will prove that the return of Sinai was definitely a net gain while the isolation of Egypt from the Arab camp was a net loss. Whether Israel will realize one day the importance of an equitable and peaceful settlement, especially to the Palestinian problem, remains to be seen.”
What he means by “an equitable and peaceful settlement” starts with the return of all the territories taken in 1967. “But it doesn’t stop there because the most important thing is satisfaction to the Palestinians. Whatever will satisfy them as human beings. They want to feel again that they are a nation, whether as part of a federation with Jordan or as an independent state. Whatever they will accept should satisfy the problem.”
There is, though, the additional problem of Jerusalem. “If Jerusalem is not liberated, if the Moslems do not have the right to go there without restrictions and to pray in the Mosque, then something is missing. I would like to see the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem removed so that Moslems from all over the world would then be free to worship in the holy places alongside any other religious group who considers Jerusalem a holy city.”
At the time of the Camp David talks, there were rumors that Saudi Arabia, under King Khaled and Crown Prince Fahd, actually tried to encourage the Egyptians to accept the agreements as a first step towards peace. But the more militant part of the Arab world wouldn’t stand for it. They objected. And the Saudis backed down.
“So many people have had that reading,” Yamani says, “but we officially denied that. I’m afraid where this matter is concerned, I have nothing else to contribute.”
*****