IT HAS OFTEN BEEN SAID IT WAS EITHER GOD OR GOLD THAT FIRST brought Americans to the Middle East. The earliest American visitors to the region tended to be missionaries or merchants, who came after the final victory against the pirates in the Barbary Wars in 1815 made it safe at last to ply the Mediterranean. The first businessmen traded rum for Turkish figs and opium and then, following the end of the civil war, surplus weapons and machinery for a broadening range of commodities that included licorice and tobacco. Oil also mattered. In 1879 the American consul in Constantinople boasted that the lamps surrounding the Prophet’s tomb in Medina burned paraffin that came from Pennsylvania. By the time of the American spy Harold Hoskins’s mission to Saudi Arabia, midway through 1943, a major reason the Middle East mattered was that oil was now beginning to flow in the opposite direction.1
The missionaries included Hoskins’s own father Franklin. Driven by millenarian beliefs or guilt at Christianity’s anti-Semitism, they originally set out to help the Jews restore their ancient state of Israel, but many of them ended up working among the Armenian and Alawite populations in the Ottoman Empire. It was incredibly slow work: the first Alawite convert to Protestantism was baptized in 1860; four years passed before there was another.
Education was key to the missionaries’ strategy. The best known of the schools that the Americans set up was the Syrian Protestant College in Beirut, at which Franklin Hoskins taught. Renamed the American University of Beirut, by 1940 it had two thousand students on its roll, meaning that the Americans had overtaken the French as the most significant providers of education in the region. It, and the American University in Cairo, which was established just after the end of the First World War, reinforced the Americans’ reputation as disinterested philanthropists. Writing a few years later, a British politician reckoned that these two institutions had “done more to promote American interests in the Middle East than all the British diplomats and armies put together.”2
While God had brought Franklin to the Middle East, it was gold that drew his son Harold back there on his mission to see Ibn Saud in the summer of 1943. Although his ostensible remit was to find out whether Ibn Saud might be willing to meet the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, by the time that he set out for Riyadh, this job had effectively become a cover for a far more important and sensitive task—one which the Americans were desperately keen to keep secret so that the British could not spike it. Indeed, it is possible that this was the real reason for Hoskins’s mission all along.
THE MOMENT THAT Roosevelt’s secretary of state, Cordell Hull, heard about Harold Ickes’s idea to buy a controlling stake in CASOC, the company that held the concession in Saudi Arabia, he realized that the administration would first need to square Ibn Saud. Although there appeared to be nothing in the agreements between the company and the king that stopped the American government from doing what Ickes was suggesting, Hull thought that the company should notify the king at least out of courtesy. Moreover, given that the king enjoyed telling Americans that one reason why he had given them the concession was because “you are very far away,” no one knew quite how he might react to a proposal that would inevitably increase American involvement in his country. And so Hull suggested sending “a special representative” to the Middle East to confer with the American ambassadors in Cairo and Jeddah. Then, together, these men would approach Ibn Saud.3
The day after Hull put this plan to Roosevelt, he told Hoskins to “proceed at once to Saudi Arabia.” In his instructions to Hoskins, Hull told him, rather theatrically, to confine himself exclusively to establishing whether Ibn Saud would meet Weizmann. But if that was really all Hoskins was expected to do, it was a pointless quest. When the American ambassador in Saudi Arabia was posed precisely that question only eight weeks earlier, he informed the State Department that there was “little likelihood” that Ibn Saud would meet Weizmann. Since then, the Life magazine interview and the tenor of the king’s comments to the president’s envoy Patrick Hurley both tended to confirm that judgment. Anthony Eden was himself bemused. He did not share Churchill’s enthusiasm for Weizmann’s plan and knew—and knew that the Americans knew—that it was implausible that the king would ever agree to it. And yet he appears to have suspected nothing.4
The mission only makes sense if Hoskins had a further, clandestine purpose. Certainly, once he had reached Cairo he behaved exactly like the “special representative” Hull had envisaged, disclosing the CASOC plan to the American ambassador. What no one in Washington appears to have anticipated was the diplomat’s reaction, which was one of horror. The Saudis had repeatedly told him that the reason they had chosen CASOC in the first place was because they felt the Americans, unlike the British, nursed no ulterior political agenda. “Overt American Government intervention,” the American diplomat now warned Washington, “would tend to tar us with the same brush.”5
The diplomat was not the only man to raise doubts about the plan. So, too, did the presidents of Texaco and SoCal, CASOC’s two shareholders, when Ickes let them into the secret in Washington at the start of August. Secretary of State Hull realized that the purchase was not going to be smooth sailing and ordered Hoskins not to say another word about the scheme. Unsure whether Hoskins had obeyed this instruction and worried that the British were intercepting his communications, the secretary of state went on to warn Hoskins not to telegraph a report of his conversation with the king but instead to send his written report in the diplomatic bag to Washington. Ickes’s plan to buy CASOC hobbled on until October when details of it leaked to the press, forcing American diplomats in Saudi Arabia to brief the king on the plan. Although Ibn Saud was surprisingly unbothered by the idea, back home in the United States the news alarmed many of the small independent oil companies, which feared the emergence of a government-backed rival. Their pressure forced Ickes to water down and then abandon his plan.
DAYS AFTER HOSKINS met Ibn Saud and discovered that the king had no desire whatsoever to see Weizmann, another American party arrived in Cairo. The Five Senators, as they were known, were partway through a round-the-world trip to investigate the progress of the war. On August 18, they dined with the British ambassador Miles Lampson and his American counterpart.
Two of the delegation, James Mead and Ralph Brewster, were departing the following morning to spend the day in Palestine, and “it was soon clear both… were abysmally ignorant of the Palestine question,” the British ambassador complained. The brevity of this side trip broke one of Brewster’s golden rules. “I don’t think one day is enough to really give you the hang of a country. And if you spend much more than a day or two there, you’re likely to become a prejudiced native,” he once told a fellow American. “But two days is just about right to make you a real expert.”6
Richard Casey appeared before the end of the dinner to tell both men more about the Zionists’ preparations to fight for independence, but it is unlikely that either senator was interested, for they were visiting for a different reason. The two men were nominees of Harry S. Truman, a fellow senator who was making a name for himself for curbing the waste that bedeviled the war effort. They had been asked by Truman to investigate the United States’ “administrative activities in foreign fields” and the distribution of American supplies abroad—in other words, how the British were using Lend-Lease. Although Roosevelt would later deny any involvement, the Five Senators’ mission was a typical Rooseveltian ruse: it would raise difficult issues that the president did not want to confront Churchill over, creating a political storm to which he would then be obliged to respond.
The Five Senators returned to Washington in late September 1943 to report back to their colleagues. At a press conference soon after their return, Brewster and Mead announced that Britain’s diplomatic and economic activity was outpacing the Americans’ and warned that the British were building oil installations and airfields using Lend-Lease money. Meanwhile, said Brewster, the United States possessed a quarter of the world’s known oil reserves but was supplying two-thirds of the fuel necessary to fight the war. “If that goes on, and we have another war in 10 or 15 years, we may have to go out with a tin dipper and ask somebody for oil,” he said.7
A day in the Mandate may not have left Brewster with a profound understanding of the simmering Arab-Jewish conflict, but his grasp of domestic politics in America was faultless. Oil was a sensitive issue at home because at that very moment the East Coast was facing an acute fuel shortage. The following week, Roosevelt was asked by journalists if Britain had been deliberately avoiding supplying the Allies with oil in order to conserve its own reserves for future use. The president explained that it was a far more efficient use of shipping tonnage to ship American oil across the Atlantic than it was to transport Middle Eastern oil from the Persian Gulf round the Cape and back north to Europe.
True as it was, Roosevelt’s explanation did not convince the senators. They issued a statement calling on the British to pull their weight over the supply of oil and delivered their conclusions to their colleagues in a secret session of the Senate. Selective leaking of what they said produced a political firestorm, which dragged in Roosevelt and then Churchill. On October 28, 1943, the leading senator of the five, Richard Russell, decided to go public with his views. “I came home with a healthy respect bordering on envy for the efficiency of the British in administration,” he told the Senate. While the British were pursuing “a definite foreign policy with respect to every corner of the globe,” the Americans he had encountered were disorganized, shortsighted, and naïve. The Americans’ willingness to supply the lion’s share of the oil and to allow the British to buy goodwill internationally using Lend-Lease aid had to cease. “With the opening of the Mediterranean and the great increase in the construction of shipping, there is no longer any valid reason for not giving our oil deposits a rest, and tapping those of other areas,” he suggested.8
A week later Truman’s committee made a suggestion. If the British could not afford American petroleum and did not have the shipping to transport it from the oil fields they did control, the United States government should consider demanding the transfer of “ownership of an equivalent value of foreign petroleum reserves or of English-held securities of corporations having a title to such reserves.” This was an incendiary proposal, and it provoked a barbed response. The British government informed the press that, in order to do as the Truman committee proposed, they would need to use Lend-Lease aid to upgrade their refinery at Abadan so that it could produce more aviation fuel and build another pipeline from Iraq to the Mediterranean.9
From the State Department Hull looked on alarmed. On the day that the failure of the government’s plan to take control of CASOC was reported in the press, he wrote a tetchy letter to Ickes, warning him that the events of the previous few weeks could not help but undermine the Saudis’ confidence in the U.S. government and CASOC. The British were already trying to exploit the fiasco, he told Ickes. American officials had found out that the British ambassador to Saudi Arabia was furtively trying to get hold of a copy of CASOC’s concession agreement—so that his government could make the king a better offer, Hull assumed. He asked his colleague urgently to come up with a new idea to develop American oil facilities in the Middle East. “We believe that strong criticism will develop if British petroleum facilities in the Middle East are further expanded… with American materials,” he finished, “for to do so will retard the development of American enterprises, jeopardize their holdings, and so tend to make this country dependent on British oil in the future.”10
AS ICKES WELL knew, what Hull was asking for was easier said than done. If the last few months had proved anything, it was the substantial advantage the British enjoyed in matters related to oil. The fact that the British government owned a significant percentage of the country’s oil companies ensured that its, and the oil industry’s, interests largely coincided. By contrast, in the United States, where the government had no stake in any oil company, and there was the added complication of a large domestic oil industry, government and industry were at odds. The U.S. government wanted to conserve domestic oil stocks, while the domestic oil companies wanted to produce. And, as the reaction to his proposal to buy CASOC had amply demonstrated, these domestic producers would fight any attempt by the government to help the bigger companies exploit foreign oil fields because they feared a glut of oil would drive down the market price.
The alternative to government intervention was private investment, but in CASOC’s case, this was not straightforward either. The two companies that were the most likely sources of capital, Jersey Standard and Socony, were precluded from investing in Saudi Arabia because they held minor stakes in the rival Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC). In 1928, they and the IPC’s other shareholders had signed a deal, known as the Red Line Agreement, that prevented each of them from investing in most of the other oil fields in Middle East if any of the other shareholders objected. Since one of these was the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, in which the British government owned a controlling stake, the British effectively had a veto on private American investment in CASOC for as long as the Red Line Agreement was in place.
It was now clearly in the United States’ interest to abandon the Red Line Agreement, and in late November 1943, the State Department’s Middle East expert, Wallace Murray, wrote that it was time to press the British to scrap the fifteen-year-old deal. The Foreign Office had recently been in touch, proposing talks about the future of the Middle East, when it hoped to win American support for the Middle East Supply Centre and a new Middle East Economic Council, the linchpins of its strategy to perpetuate British influence in the region. As a quid pro quo, the Americans now demanded a discussion on Middle Eastern oil.
When the British prevaricated over the scope and level of the talks, the United States government retaliated. First Ickes unveiled what he described as a “blunderbuss shot”: a new proposal for the Petroleum Reserves Corporation to finance a pipeline from Saudi Arabia to the Mediterranean coast, which would allow the Arabian American Oil Company, or Aramco—as CASOC had now been diplomatically renamed—to compete directly with the British-dominated Iraq Petroleum Company, which also piped oil to the Mediterranean. Then on February 11, 1944 (before the precise scope of the talks had been agreed), the New York Times reported that the British government was sending a delegation to Washington for discussions on how best to develop Middle Eastern oil. The State Department ramped up the pressure. First, it threatened to argue in public that the Red Line Agreement breached the clause in the Atlantic Charter, in which Churchill had committed to endeavor to further “the enjoyment… of access, on equal terms… to the raw materials of the world.” Then, when this failed to move the British, it threatened to announce that the conference would be opened by the president and the American delegation led by Cordell Hull, a choice that made it clear that the Americans expected the proceedings to be decisive and binding. “Roosevelt is jumping us into a conference on oil in the Middle East—rather outrageously,” wrote Eden’s private secretary. “We cannot bear anyone to touch us in that part of the world—even our friends.”11
The British ambassador to Washington demanded a meeting with Roosevelt, which took place on February 18, 1944. The president wanted to allay British fears and showed him a rough map he had drawn of the Middle East. Iran’s oil belonged to Britain, he said. Britain and the United States shared Iraqi and Kuwaiti oil. Saudi oil was America’s.12
The report of this meeting did not reassure Churchill. Still bruised by how dismissively Roosevelt had treated him at the Tehran Conference with Stalin late in 1943, he now telegraphed the president directly, starting a fortnight-long spat between the two men.
Blaming the Five Senators, Churchill noted “apprehension in some quarters here that the United States has a desire to deprive us of our oil assets in the Middle East,” a fear that the threatened announcement about Roosevelt’s and Hull’s involvement in a Middle Eastern oil conference only reinforced. If Roosevelt took part, “the whole question will become one of the first magnitude in Parliament,” he warned. “It will be felt that we are being hustled.” When Roosevelt responded in kind, revealing his own worry “about the rumor that the British wish to horn in on Saudi Arabian reserves” and rejecting Churchill’s proposal of technical talks, the prime minister resisted, threatening the danger of “a wide difference opening” in the run-up to D-Day if the Americans made their announcement regardless. A week passed before Roosevelt responded to tell Churchill that “we are not making sheep’s eyes at your oil fields in Iraq or Iran,” but that the conference could not be held off much longer. Churchill, gratified by Roosevelt’s commitment, replied to give the U.S. president “the fullest assurance that we have no thought of trying to horn in upon your interests or property in Saudi Arabia.”13
Two days later the British cabinet confirmed that it was ready to send a delegation to Washington for preliminary talks. In exchange, the State Department agreed that its Middle East expert, Wallace Murray, would come to London to talk about the future of the Middle East simultaneously.14
By the end of February 1944, it looked briefly as if both governments might reconcile their differences over the Middle East. The British hoped for American endorsement of their plans for the Middle East Supply Centre. The Americans expected an agreement on oil that would allay their fear that the British were attempting to usurp their privileged position in Saudi Arabia. Between London and Washington, a fragile truce existed. In the Middle East, however, their representatives on the spot had other plans.