9
Exploring the Wilder Areas
ON JANUARY 25, 1948, IBN SAUD RECEIVED A TELEGRAM FROM THE headman of a remote village in the south of his kingdom that made him “very angry” indeed. Three days earlier an Englishman named Wilfred Thesiger had turned up, unannounced, in the mudbrick settlement, which lay three hundred miles southwest of Riyadh. “Who is this fellow?” asked the king, before ordering the headman to throw Thesiger in prison. The explorer’s sudden appearance was an unwelcome reminder that the southern frontier of his kingdom was undefined, disputed, and insecure. That particularly mattered now that there was thought to be oil in the vicinity.1
To reach the village, Thesiger had had to cross four hundred miles of desert. Known as the Rub al-Khali, or Empty Quarter, this wilderness had an appalling reputation. Its sands drifted into dunes up to seven hundred feet high, and its few wells and meager grazing were fought over by feuding tribes. “Not even Allah has been there,” said people who lived on its edges. It formed a formidable barrier, if not a formal border, between Saudi Arabia and the coastal sheikhdoms on the horn and south coast of the Arabian Peninsula, which were British protectorates.2
Cartographers of that era drew the coastal sheikhdoms’ borders as dotted lines that petered out as they ventured inland toward the label “Rub al-Khali”—which was invariably expansive, to fill what otherwise would be a large blank space on the map. In 1913 the Ottoman Turks and the British had recognized their respective spheres of influence in the southern half of the Arabian Peninsula, but the Blue Line agreement—named after the color of the pencil that was used—was never ratified, and when the war ended and the Ottoman Empire disintegrated, Ibn Saud unsurprisingly refused to recognize it. He argued that tribal loyalties were what counted. Claiming that his family had originally come from the contested area, he sent tax collectors in to stake his claim. From then on, he based his entitlement to this swathe of territory on the grounds that the tribesmen his taxmen found were ready to pay tribute to him.
Shifting desert sands and changing human loyalties had not stopped him or, across the desert, the Trucial sheikhs* of the Gulf coast and the Sultan of Muscat and Oman from granting concessions to oil companies to hunt for oil within the territories they claimed as theirs. The king had granted Aramco exclusive drilling rights in “the eastern portion of our Saudi Arab kingdom, within its frontiers,” while the company’s bigger, British-dominated rivals, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and the Iraq Petroleum Company, had bought concessions in neighboring Qatar and Oman and in the Trucial States, including Abu Dhabi, which all made similar reference to borders that had not yet been defined. Since by 1945 Aramco’s geologists were confident that there was oil beneath the Rub al-Khali, in the absence of a territorial settlement, sooner or later these competing companies’ exploratory activities would bring them, and their American and British backers, into conflict. In the wake of Thesiger’s appearance in his kingdom at the start of 1948, the king would take a step that brought the risk of conflict closer.3
IT IS NOT CLEAR whether it was a complete coincidence that Wilfred Thesiger was approached to conduct a survey of the southern fringes of the Empty Quarter soon after the British heard that Aramco believed that there was oil there. But after Britain’s ambassador in Jeddah reported the American belief to London in January 1945, that spring the British government decided to organize a “summer locust reconnaissance of the area south of the Rub al-Khali.” By April the Middle East Anti-Locust Unit had appointed Thesiger to undertake the expedition.4
“I was not really interested in locusts,” Thesiger later admitted. But he was keen to cross the Empty Quarter, and the Anti-Locust Unit, a remnant of the once-powerful Middle East Supply Centre, represented the best way to do so, because its officers, unlike European diplomats, were allowed free range by Ibn Saud. Whether or not there was an additional, surreptitious reason for this trip, the locust-hunting mission would give Thesiger the opportunity to find out more about the true loyalties of the empty desert’s tribes.5
By then Thesiger already had a well-established reputation as a danger seeker. Born in Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in 1910, then educated at Eton and Oxford, he returned to Abyssinia repeatedly to hunt big game and to cross a forbidden sultanate in the northeast of the country. After five years in the Sudan political service—during which time he shot seventy lions and gained vast experience of desert travel—he served on the guerrilla force that liberated Abyssinia from the Italians. He then joined Special Operations Executive (SOE) and later the Special Air Service, before Haile Selassie, whose coronation he had attended in 1930, invited him back to Addis Ababa to serve as his political adviser. It was as this job began to grate—he had a “distaste for officialdom,” said one contemporary—that the chief anti-locust officer approached him.6
The instructions for that first mission in October 1945 did not require Thesiger to venture into the sandy desert proper. But during this expedition he heard about a Bedu raiding party that had crossed the Empty Quarter from the Persian Gulf. A year later he returned, determined to repeat the feat that these raiders had accomplished but in the opposite direction. Since he was six foot two and the hatred of Christians in that part of the world was fierce, his guides felt it would be wisest if he pretended to be Syrian, since he knew southern Syria from his time in SOE.
Thesiger’s crossing of the Empty Quarter over the winter of 1946–1947 took place as tension over the location of the Saudi frontier was mounting. With Aramco keen to investigate the possibility of oil south of the Qatar peninsula, Ibn Saud’s fearsome governor in the east of the kingdom, Ibn Jiluwi, was trying to buttress his master’s claim to the disputed area by sending out tax collectors, while the king tried to make trouble for his most likely rival, Sheikh Shakhbut, the ruler of nearby Abu Dhabi, by encouraging the ruler of Dubai to attack Shakhbut’s tribe. The epicenter of this conflict, the Liwa oasis, southwest of Abu Dhabi, also happened to be Thesiger’s goal. But when Thesiger reached it, after a journey of 450 miles that took three weeks, his Bedu guides realized that their charge’s vast footprints would give them all away. “Then Ibn Saud’s tax collectors will hear of it and they will arrest us all and take us off to Ibn Jiluwi,” feared one of the tribesmen. “God preserve us from that, I know Ibn Jiluwi. He is a tyrant, utterly without mercy.” Knowing that Thesiger’s Syrian disguise would not stand up to close scrutiny, the Bedu obliged the explorer to turn east, then south, and return through the Omani hinterland to the Indian Ocean coast.7
On his return to London, Thesiger briefed both the Foreign Office and the Iraq Petroleum Company about what he had seen and began to undermine the Saudis’ claim to the area south of Qatar. In a lecture at the Royal Geographical Society in October 1947, he glossed over the fact that it was the presence of Saudi taxmen that had forced him to turn back before completing his journey. Instead, he observed that the people of the Liwa traded with Abu Dhabi and that the only tribe that roamed the Empty Quarter was connected to the settlements of Buraimi and Ibri in what is now Oman, as well as Abu Dhabi, and not with the nearest centers of Saudi power, Riyadh and Hofuf. His knowledge was clearly valuable, and at some point soon after his talk, he was approached by Aramco officials, who asked if he would work for them. Thesiger would always claim that he turned down the company’s offer. Within days of giving the lecture, he was on his way back to Arabia again, this time hoping to make a more westerly crossing of the Rub al-Khali.
When Thesiger previously sought permission for this journey, Ibn Saud had refused to give it. This time, he decided simply not to ask him. “I should be defying the King,” he later wrote, “but I hoped that I should be able to water at some well on the far side of the sands and then slip away unobserved.” However, rather than stick to this plan, when Thesiger crossed the sands and reached the well he had been aiming for, rather than return at once into the desert, he continued to the village of Sulaiyil, whose headman warned Ibn Saud of his appearance.8
Had Ibn Saud’s one British adviser, the renegade civil servant St. John Philby, not been present when the king received the headman’s telegram, Thesiger might have ended up languishing in a Saudi jail. But Philby, who had crossed the Empty Quarter himself during the 1930s, had known of Thesiger’s plan from the outset and was willing to cover for him. Explaining that Thesiger had been working for the Anti-Locust Unit (which was in fact no longer the case), he suggested that his compatriot had run out of water and had to make for the nearest well.
Ibn Saud was initially unwilling to forgive Thesiger and his Bedu guides their trespass. “They had no right to come without permission,” he raged, “and if we overlooked their offence, we would have others doing the same thing.” But he relented later that evening and let Thesiger on his way once more.9
Thesiger again made for the Liwa. In the eleven months since his last expedition, the local tribe had chased off Ibn Saud’s tax inspectors, and with a truce between Dubai and Abu Dhabi in place, he was able to ride on to Abu Dhabi this time.
Wilfred Thesiger in Abu Dhabi, having crossed the Empty Quarter following his brief arrest by the Saudis in January 1948.
BRIEF THOUGH IT was, the incident had a profound impact on the king since it gave him the impression that his British-backed rivals were stealing a march on him, and he quickly moved to do something about it. At the point when Thesiger appeared in Sulaiyil, the Saudis were in the process of renegotiating their agreement with Aramco. In the original deal, the king had granted the company exclusive rights for sixty years in exchange for a royalty that worked out at twenty-two cents a barrel. By now, however, the king thoroughly regretted these terms, and Thesiger’s intrusion can only have reinforced his nagging feeling that they did nothing to incentivize Aramco to work faster. By the end of the negotiation, the Saudis had forced Aramco to increase the royalty it paid to thirty-three cents a barrel and to make a far more important concession that would cause wide reverberations.
Concluded in April 1948, the revised agreement also required Aramco to give up large blocks of territory it did not want, every three years. The company was now in a race against time to identify where else there might be oil in its concession, a hunt that would provoke the rival oil companies holding the neighboring concessions into a similar spurt of activity. As always, the king’s main motive was money. But by adding this condition, he hoped to make the oil company, its American shareholders, and ultimately the U.S. government, which taxed Aramco’s profits, his allies when the dispute over the frontier finally came to a head.
WHILE THE SAUDIS were finalizing the new terms that they would impose on Aramco, Thesiger continued on his journey. Having arrived in Abu Dhabi, he met Sheikh Shakhbut before riding a hundred miles inland in order to meet the sheikh’s brother Zayid in the Buraimi oasis, a place that was to acquire an enormous strategic significance in the years that followed. Situated at the base of the horn of the Arabian Peninsula, and equidistant from the Gulf and Indian Ocean coasts, the oasis not only provided a natural vantage point over the Trucial Sheikhdoms but also controlled the route into Oman to the southeast, which Thesiger had used to avoid the attentions of Ibn Saud’s tax collectors a year earlier: whoever ruled the oasis could dominate the southeast of the Arabian Peninsula.
Buraimi was not a picture-book desert pool but a collection of date palm groves that were fed by springs, which rose in the surrounding area. The groves, and the traffic that stopped by, supported nine villages. Shakhbut’s brother Zayid inhabited one of the six villages that belonged to Abu Dhabi; the remaining three—including Buraimi itself—were nominally under the Sultan of Muscat’s control. In another of the Abu Dhabi villages lived the Iraq Petroleum Company’s representative, a British man named Richard Bird.
A cynic would say that IPC’s main reason for buying the Abu Dhabi and Oman concessions in the first place was to deny them to its American rivals. But having previously taken a relaxed approach to oil exploration, the company was hurrying to catch up because it was aware that Aramco had stepped up its own activity in southeast Arabia. Oddly, the greatest hurdle that it faced was the man who had granted the concession in the first place, the Sultan of Muscat. The sultan, whose control of the Omani hinterland was weak, did not want to put his authority to the test by offending local sensitivities, and so he was unwilling to sanction the company’s exploratory activities, which required the acquiescence of the local tribes.
To bypass the sultan, in Buraimi Richard Bird was trying to negotiate access to the hinterland with the two men he had identified as its gatekeepers, a local sheikh and the man who wielded real power in the hinterland, the Imam of Oman, who was the sultan’s rival. Both the sheikh and the imam were deeply suspicious of Bird’s motives, probably fearing that greater British influence would end the profitable slave trade on which the economy of the Buraimi oasis still hinged. “It is an extremely delicate problem this penetration of Oman,” Bird grumbled. “No bride was ever more bashful of the advances of the other party.” With the seduction at a crucial stage, it was a deeply unwelcome development when, on April 5, 1948, Thesiger crashed in, announcing his plan to enter this most sensitive area “in order to obtain a specimen of the wild goat,” known locally as the tahr. When Bird produced the head of exactly this animal and said that it might be bagged more locally, Thesiger changed his tune, saying that the flora, as well as the fauna, of inner Oman was also of interest.10
Bird’s initial instinct was to dismiss Thesiger as a poseur. The British oilman was amused to note that, although the explorer aped the Bedu to the point of using his dagger point to take out his penis when he needed to urinate, and decried “the automobile” as an invention of the devil, he invariably accepted the offer of a lift “without hesitation.” But he was soon forced into a reappraisal. The fact was that he had still to visit an area that Thesiger had passed through a year earlier, where the explorer said he had seen oil coming to the surface in several places. This corroborated rumors Bird had already heard but so far had been unable to verify. As he conceded, “Thesiger definitely knows where the oil is to be found.”11
When Thesiger then told Bird that the tribes who inhabited the same area were loyal to Ibn Saud, he aroused Bird’s suspicions. Realizing that such information would help Aramco and the Saudis, Bird wondered if Thesiger might be working for them. Mischievously, he asked him whether he had agreed to work for the American company when it approached him in London. “It was a pure shot in the dark on my part,” he said afterward. With it, however, Bird hit the bull’s-eye. Thesiger, startled by Bird’s apparent knowledge, said that he had declined the offer—thus letting slip that one had been made in the first place. He went on to say he knew the Americans had been into territory belonging to Abu Dhabi. Following that conversation, Bird warned his boss that Thesiger had been approached by their rivals and recommended that the IPC or the British government should hurry up and hire him.12
“I was averse to all oil companies dreading the changes and disintegration of society which they inevitably caused,” Thesiger would later claim. But by the time that he next talked about his travels, he was in the IPC’s pay as “an advance agent for exploring the wilder areas.” When he spoke at the Royal Geographical Society again in October 1948, he provided a detailed description of the Liwa, which had “never yet been seen by a European.” Of its people, he was able to report that “they all owe allegiance to the Abu Fallah sheikhs of Abu Dhabi.” Of other local tribes’ allegiance to Ibn Saud, whose ambassador to London was sitting in the front row of the talk, Thesiger discreetly said nothing.13
Again, Thesiger left almost immediately for Abu Dhabi. The pattern of his next expeditions precisely fitted the Iraq Petroleum Company’s priorities. The likely true purpose of his bustard-hunting trip through the Liwa in November 1948 was to look for evidence of further American intrusion into the area. In January 1949, he ventured south into the Omani hinterland, where previously he had seen signs of oil and where the tribes displayed pro-Saudi proclivities. At some point before embarking on this trip, he had received some training from the oil company about what to look out for. It was during this journey that he spotted two hills named Salakh and Madhamar. His next article for the Royal Geographical Society’s journal mentioned both in passing, but it was only in his book much later that he explicitly stated their significance. “Both of them were dome-shaped, and I thought regretfully that their formation was of the sort which geologists associate with oil.” The sorrow was entirely disingenuous.14
THESIGER ARRIVED BACK in Buraimi to hear news of a crisis. For several months there had been reports of growing American activity in the region. In March, IPC’s Qatar subsidiary reported that Aramco had built roads and trig points, or fixed surveying stations, in areas covered by its own concession. From Sharjah, a fortnight later, came news that an Aramco airplane had set out to survey territory that lay on the edge of the company’s own concession in Oman. Then on April 3, 1949—three days before Thesiger reached Buraimi—a convoy of American-made vehicles equipped for off-road driving, carrying six Americans, their Arab drivers, and several guards, was spotted on the road between Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Although the Americans said that they were going to Dubai, by the time the local representative of the Iraq Petroleum Company arrived to investigate, they had vanished—behavior that only heightened British suspicions that Aramco was prospecting for oil in an area that lay well east of territory that was indisputably Saudi. A few days later Bird reported that an American oil company official had admitted to him that his firm enjoyed State Department backing. Bird reckoned that the U.S. government was deliberately encouraging conflict between the British and American companies, having calculated that Britain’s dependence on American money meant that the British government would be reluctant to risk a clash.
The British government had stayed quiet on the question of the frontier until now, but mainly because of differences between government departments on whether they should broach the matter with the decrepit Ibn Saud, since they were unsure if his kingdom would outlast him. A formal complaint from Sheikh Shakhbut following further rumors that Aramco was surveying the area west of the Liwa finally forced Whitehall’s hand. After IPC officials had flown over and located the rival company’s encampment, on April 21 the British political officer in Abu Dhabi and an IPC representative set out by car across the desert to hand the party a letter telling it to withdraw, which they delivered a day later. The Aramco geologists they met at the campsite freely admitted that their maps showed that they were in Abu Dhabi territory. “We go where our Saudi guards take us,” one of them explained.15
Unsurprisingly, Richard Bird suspected that this was untrue, and he speculated that the guards accompanied the party not simply to protect it but to endow it with some useful menace. Having heard from an Arab resident of Buraimi that there had been rumors of Saudi intentions to take over the oasis before Aramco appeared on the edge of the Liwa and on the road between Dubai and Abu Dhabi, he reported that the local sheikhs in Buraimi believed that Ibn Saud had designs on Oman. “So do I,” he added.16
In London the Foreign Office accepted Bird’s argument and quickly appreciated its implications. If Ibn Saud could establish himself in Buraimi between the Trucial Sheikhdoms and the Sultanate of Muscat, he would be able to prevent the Iraq Petroleum Company from using the oasis for exploration in either of the Abu Dhabi or Omani concessions. Bird predicted what would happen next. Once it had dislodged the British from the oasis, “a party of Americans under Ibn Saud’s auspices could enter areas which we could never penetrate.… I don’t think the tribes would harm them because of their fear of Ibn Saud.”17
Bird raced to Muscat, hoping that the news of Aramco’s intrusion might at last persuade the sultan to take action, but he was disappointed. The sultan refused to sign letters to the sheikhs of the Buraimi oasis authorizing them to deal directly with Bird, probably because he did not wish to test their loyalty. When Bird returned to Buraimi and tried anyway to bribe them to accept the sultan’s sovereignty, they refused. Thesiger, when invited to give his opinion, believed that it was “extremely unlikely that the present Sultan will ever establish his authority over either the insecure area east or south of Buraimi.… He is too weak and does not maintain sufficient direct contact with the tribesmen.”18
By now Ibn Saud’s health was visibly deteriorating, and he was beginning to show signs of senile paranoia. When in August 1949 in Syria, Colonel Zaim was overthrown and murdered and his successor put a union with Iraq back on the table, the king believed the British were inciting the surrounding states to remove him. In retaliation, on October 14, 1949, he did exactly what the British had expected and made a formal claim to the base of the Qatar peninsula, the Liwa oasis, and the Buraimi area—a demand rejected a month later by the British.
Contrary to what Thesiger had said in public about the loyalties of the local tribes, he told the British government privately that the facts did not favor its case. When the British government rejected the Saudi claim, Thesiger was on the Gulf coast, preparing to make another foray into Oman. This time he hoped to visit the Jebel Akhdar, the mountain that screened off the hinterland from the coast. But he was nearly undone when the Imam of Oman sent out a hundred-strong force to try to kill him. As he reported to another IPC man in Dubai, Edward Henderson, when he finally got back to the coast, his narrow escape provided proof, if it were needed, that “west of the mountains the Sultan is without any influence at all.”19
Henderson had served with Thesiger in Special Operations Executive in the war and respected his old comrade, whose experience boded ill for his company’s operations. “The fact that even Thesiger has such difficulty in the imam’s territory and cannot reach certain parts demonstrates the utter fanaticism of this ruler, and the difficulty we would be in,” he concluded. The IPC would not be prospecting for oil in the Omani interior for the foreseeable future. The danger that Ibn Saud might manage to exploit the unstable situation meant that Buraimi was vulnerable.
To plug the gap, Thesiger advised supporting Sheikh Shakhbut’s brother Zayid and to encourage him to seize control of territory southeast of Buraimi. But this sounded far too bold a strategy to Britain’s top official in the Gulf, who, as always, advised caution. “It is in our interests,” he suggested, “to allow the existing situation to continue for the present in spite of its fictitious character… it would be very dangerous to make a change.” The imam, like Ibn Saud, was growing old and was regularly reported to be dying, and there was a chance that the sultan might be able to take advantage of his rivals’ deaths to impose his authority upon the tribes. In fact, Ibn Saud would die in 1953, while the imam lasted until 1954. Doing nothing, as ever, was the simplest option, and once the government had accepted its Gulf officials’ ever-cautious advice, all it could do was hope and wait.20
* So called because of the truces the British had obliged them to sign a century earlier, by which they had agreed to give up their most lucrative lines of work—piracy and slavery.