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The Masquerade 337

presided over by U. Alexis Johnson, the under-secretary of state, assisted by
the director of the office of fuels and energy in the Department, James E.
Akins. Soon after the meeting began, the company representatives, to their
astonishment, found themselves subjected to a lengthy harangue about the
misfortunes of the Palestinians and the tribulations that their guerrilla forces
were then undergoing at the hands of the Jordanian army. The Palestinian
question, the oilmen were told, was intimately linked with the difficulties they
were experiencing in Libya, and it followed, therefore, that a settlement of the
Palestinian problem would lead to a resolution of the oil companies’ difficul­
ties. It was an interesting contention, not only because of the source from
which it issued, but also because it was a faithful echo of the argument which
the Libyans had been propounding over the previous months.
Why should it have been brought forth at this juncture and under these

particular auspices? The answer would seem to reside in the personal and
political convictions of the State Department’s oil expert, James Akins. Akins
took a rather favourable view of the Qaddafi regime, at least in comparison with
its predecessor, the government of King Idris. ‘The Idris regime’, he told a
sub-committee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in October 1973,
‘was certainly one of the most corrupt in the area and probably one of the most
corrupt in the world. Concessions were given, contracts were given on the basis
of payments to members of the royal family.’ What lends interest to these
otherwise commonplace observations is that they were made after the complic­
ity of Qaddafi’s government in terrorist activities in Europe had become known
to the whole world. They were also made after Akins had been appointed to the
post of American ambassador to Saudi Arabia, a country where the securing of
concessions and contracts by bribery and other corrupt practices had almost
attained the status of a national industry. That Akins felt strong sympathy for-
one might almost say, identification with - the beliefs and aspirations of Arab
nationalism is now more or less public knowledge. Certainly he himself is
reputed to have made little if any attempt to conceal his thoughts and feelings
on the subject. As with so many American Arabophiles and partisans of Arab
causes, especially that of Palestinian irredentism, it is possible to detect in the
opinions he espoused the formative influence of the propaganda on behalf of
Arab causes, and particularly that of Arab nationalism, which American
Protestant missionaries in the Levant had been disseminating to their fellow-
countrymen for a good century past.

Although Akins himself does not appear to have had any strong missionary
connexion with the Middle East, he was a Quaker, and the Quakers have been
among the most active and dedicated workers in the Levantine vineyard for
several generations. From 1948 to 1950, as a young man in his early twenties,
Akins was engaged in charitable work with the American Friends Service
Committee in Europe, helping to repair the ravages of the Second World War.
He then went on to Beirut, where he taught in a school for a year and spent a