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The Masquerade 327

Exporting Countries. The first resolution passed by the new organization
outlined its immediate aims, viz. ‘that members shall demand that oil com­
panies maintain their prices steady and free from all unnecessary fluctuations;
that members shall endeavour, by all means available to them, to restore
present prices to the levels prevailing before the reductions. . .’. One of the
most active personalities in the new organization was the director-general of
petroleum and mineral resources in Saudi Arabia, Abdullah al-Tariki. He had
been a prominent participant in the first Arab Petroleum Congress held in
Cairo in April 1959 to discuss the implications of the initial reduction in posted
prices in February of that year. The conference had been attended by delegates
from all the Arab League states except Iraq (then in the throes of one of her

innumerable quarrels with Egypt) and by unofficial delegates from Venezuela,
Persia and the minor Gulf states. At the second congress held in Beirut a month
after the foundation of OPEC, Tariki vehemently castigated the oil companies
for their arbitrary conduct over posted prices, accusing them of cheating the
oil-producing states of their rightful revenues by concealing the true amounts
of their profits in recent years.
Tariki was a man of considerable ability and initiative, passionate by
temperament, fervently nationalist in sentiment, and governed by an over­
weening sense of his own righteousness. He had been educated at the Univer­
sity of Texas and trained by Texaco, and in his years in the United States he had
acquired a good deal of information about such matters as oil-depletion allow­
ances, conservation and cartels, much of it by courtesy of the anti-trust
hearings conducted by Congress into the activities of the major American oil
companies in the 1950s. Many of the ideas about profit-sharing, participation,
conservation, price-fixing and production levels which were to become the

common coinage of Arab oil negotiations later in the 1960s and 1970s, if they
did not actually originate in Tariki’s fertile mind, owed their wide circulation
to his vigorous and tireless promotion of them in the oil capitals of the Middle
East. Although he fell from grace in 1962 and was replaced as Saudi Arabian oil
minister by Ahmad Zaki al-Yamani, his ideas and his influence persisted for
years afterwards, with consequences which he doubtless found highly gratify­
ing.

Tariki wanted OPEC to operate as a cartel, fixing not only prices but
production levels as well. The times were out of joint, however, for such an
ambitious enterprise, because the world in the early 1960s was nowhere near as
dependent for oil supplies upon the handful of member countries that made up
OPEC as it is today. Moreover, the market for oil remained comparatively
depressed, so that real prices continued to decline. OPEC’s twin goals, of
restoring posted prices to their previous levels and restricting production
so as to keep the purchase price of oil buoyant, were not attained, largely
because each member state was anxious to obtain as big a share of the market
as possible for itself, and therefore refused to limit its production to a