Questions for the CIA
ALAN, RAY
Eurp vista BY RAY ALAN Questions for the CIA The Watergate serial seems to have reached its penultimate installment, but addicts should not despair. Another fascinating American mystery is at...
...Some Saudis even accuse Sadat and American oilmen of wanting to keep Saudi Arabia underdeveloped, a mere exporter of energy to Western and Egyptian industry...
...Economic officials of the European Community warned members confidentially in July to expect a Mideast oil crisis by Christmas...
...After the October War, there are not very many people around with that much faith in the CIA...
...nato officials take it for granted that when the Suez Canal is reopened, the Kremlin will double the size of its naval force in the Indian Ocean and try to improve on its present Iraqi toehold in the Persian Gulf...
...Presumably, Israel would then have taken countermeasures, the war would have been much shorter, many lives would have been saved, and there would probably have been no oil embargo...
...petroleum experts to prospect the Libyan border zone north and south of the Siwa oasis (where five years of Soviet exploration failed to find oil) and the northern fringes of the Nile delta...
...its Foreign Minister is expected to make a trip there...
...Its theme is the CIA's supposed ignorance of Egyptian and Syrian preparations to attack Israel last fall...
...It may succeed, though a number of Arabs assume that the territory will one day be part of Iraq...
...Mideast policy in cruder, more hostile, terms than the British...
...In October the Kremlin urged Baghdad to send troops to fight the Israelis...
...By mid-October, when the fighting was at its peak, the immediate problem in Britain, France and some other Common Market countries was not to obtain petroleum but to find storage capacity for the stuff...
...The Kuwait government is hoping to buy a quiet life by subsidizing Palestinian organizations, taking over the Anglo-American Kuwait Oil Company, and paying for Syria's new Soviet arms and aircraft...
...They believe Washington not only knew the Egyptian-Syrian attack was being prepared but decided to use it to reassert American economic influence in Egypt and provoke the oil producers into taking restrictive measures harmful to Western European and Japanese industry...
...Both Iraq and Syria are, by a convenient coincidence, under the rule of military juntas that profess allegiance to the pro-Soviet Baath party...
...For it was Egypt's initial military success, and President Anwar el-Sadat's heightened prestige, that persuaded Saudi Arabia and other Arab producers to join the victory parade and decree oil cuts...
...One does not need to be a collusion maniac to realize that the Soviet Union would not be sorry to have the United States share its Egyptian burden and may soon give priority to strategic and economic interests east of Suez...
...Whether or not this was the case, Sadat has in fact told his ministers that Cairo must attract U.S...
...I have no means of checking their claims...
...They imported 12 million tons in 1972 and plan to take 25 million tons this year, mostly from Iraq via a Western-built pipeline across Syria...
...that the CIA will have a free hand to sort out Libya...
...Other Arab governments are aware of this and are annoyed—the nominally "Left-wing" juntas of Syria and Iraq for ideological reasons, the Saudis because they are eager to acquire oil-based industries and suspect Sadat of cutting in on the relatively close relationship they have had with Washington in recent years...
...Moscow pays for the oil with military hardware—a trade that may tempt it to stir the Mideast cauldron occasionally...
...Paris is convinced that the rapid industrial growth of the European Community and Japan in the past decade has given the U.S...
...This last theory is undoubtedly far-fetched...
...A Syrian Baathist said recently that his party would like to see a union of Iraq, Kuwait and Syria, and then added, "no doubt the CIA will break it up...
...Yet, if Washington knew, why did it not alert Tel Aviv...
...To date, gas has been used in Mideast conflicts only by the Egyptians during the late Gamal Abdel Nasser's campaign against the Yemenis...
...He is probably in a minority, however...
...Another fascinating American mystery is at present looking for a producer...
...The Saudis are now trying hard to attract Japanese and European investment...
...Kurdish sources charge that the advisers are training Iraqis in the use of gas and another chemical weapon, and that the Army has taken delivery of thousands of Russian gas-masks...
...A second school of collusion theorists believes that Egypt will henceforth lie in America's sphere of influence, together with Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia...
...Now Soviet advisers are helping Iraq's Army plan a spring campaign against the irrepressible Kurds in the northern part of the country, whom Moscow supported until it needed foreign oil...
...Britain's Department of Trade and Industry was told by the Prime Minister's office early in August to be prepared for a fuel shortage provoked by military action in the Near East...
...Coupons for gasoline rationing were issued to British post offices before the end of the month, and oil imports were stepped up...
...The USSR's Iraqi friends are eager for closer links with the Kuwaitis, but the latter are wary, remembering Baghdad's past schemings to take over their incredibly rich little territory...
...capital and knowhow...
...One British view is that the White House did know what was coming but wished to shake Israeli complacency and allow Sadat a tactical success that would give him sufficient self-confidence to open peace talks with Israel and accept American assistance in exploring for oil and realizing his ambition to make Egypt a major refining and petro-chemicals center...
...People who know about such things believe that at least two European intelligence services deduced or guessed that an attack was coming and informed their governments —weeks in advance...
...and Soviet officers are due to arrive in Kuwait soon...
...Consequently, it seems inconceivable that the CIA was left out in the cold, or that it failed to tell the White House what European services, if not its own agents, were anticipating...
...Contributors to Le Monde and other relatively sober papers have written of "a high-level plot between the Big Two" and "another Yalta...
...Their bait: cheaper petroleum than that available to industries established in Egypt...
...Though the Saudi oil minister, Sheik Ahmed Yamani, does not go quite so far, he adopted an anti-American posture during his recent talks with European governments, warning them not to join the United States in a defensive grouping of consumer nations...
...Meanwhile, French officials interpret U.S...
...His economic advisers would like U.S...
...Collusion Theories Some French commentators have, indeed, attributed the Mideast war and oil crisis to American-Soviet collusion...
...a bad shock, and that Washington is grateful to the Arabs for having halted it...
...Kuwait—which, as I have noted, balances Egypt in some French collusion theories—is certainly becoming a focus of Soviet interest in the Persian Gulf...
...The purpose of the plot is allegedly to wreck the Common Market, to strengthen each superpower's hold on "its" half of Europe, and to partition the Near East...
...The Soviets are becoming increasingly interested in Arab oil, which they need in order to keep their own oil exports flowing to Central and Western Europe...
...and that Kuwait will in due course join Iraq, Syria, South Yemen and Somalia in the USSR's shadow...
...The emirate sent a military mission to visit Moscow in January...
Vol. 57 • March 1974 • No. 5
