Page 255 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

252 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

Nearly all the technical, architectural and engineering skills that the Saudis
require at the present time are supplied by foreigners - by several thousand
‘white coolies’ and by several more thousand Pakistanis and northern Arabs.
The winds of Paradise are assuredly blowing through Saudi Arabia today, if
not in quite the way that the old ikhwan once envisaged.

If the first pillar of the Saudi state has been the Wahhabi religious movement,
the second has been the Arabian American Oil Company. Virtually from the
day in 1933 when the first of AR AMCO’s four parent companies, Standard Oil
of California, obtained a sixty-year concession for the Eastern Province, the
company has served the house of Saud as guide, confidant, tutor, counsellor,
emissary, advocate, steward and factotum. Indeed, it is doubtful whether in
the entire history of Western enterprise in the East, even the heyday of the
English East India Company, a great commercial corporation has so placed
itself at the service of a foreign state as ARAMCO has done in Saudi Arabia.
Without its loyal and devoted assistance the kingdom would certainly not be
what it is today.

Standard Oil of California operated its concession through an affiliate, the
California Arabian Standard Oil Company (CASOC), to which the Texas Oil
Company (Texaco) was admitted as an equal partner in 1936. As mentioned
earlier, oil was discovered in 1938 and the first shipment was loaded at Ras
Tanura in May 1939. The war brought about a run-down of operations, and as
it progressed it also caused CASOC a certain amount of apprehension about its
own future. Ibn Saud was not only indebted to Britain for a substantial loan she
had made him but he was also heavily reliant upon the British subsidy which
had been paid to him since the early days of the war to keep the Saudi Arabian
economy afloat. CASOC feared that this reliance might correspondingly
incline Ibn Saud to invite the British to participate in the exploitation of Saudi
Arabia’s oil, perhaps even to abrogate CASOC’s concession and transfer it, in
part at least, to a British-controlled oil company. To counter this imagined
danger, CASOC used every opportunity it could to undermine Britain’s
standing at Ibn Saud’s court, even to the extent of suggesting that the subsidy
from Britain was in reality American money paid through the medium of the

British exchequer.
Whispered innuendoes about British guile, however, were not considered
sufficiently effective to safeguard CASOC’s future, so the company turned to

Washington and the State Department for help. The animosity borne by the
Roosevelt administration for the British empire in Asia was paralleled by the
irritation felt by the State Department at Britain’s political ascendancy in the
Middle East. The twin sentiments found expression in a joint determination to
undermine Britain’s rule in the East. An approach by CASOC to the adminis­
tration and the State Department for aid was sympathetically received by those
responsible for American policy towards Saudi Arabia, and in February 1943