Page 341 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

338 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

further year or two in educational work of a charitable nature. In 1954, al the
age of twenty-eight, he entered the US Foreign Service, and in the course of the
next dozen years he served (apart from posts in Europe) in Damascus, Beirut,
Baghdad and Kuwait, before being appointed in 1967 to the office of fuels and
energy in the Department of State. He was, from all accounts, a man consumed
by a sense of mission, stiff in opinions to the point of inflexibility, an ardent
Arabophile, and utterly convinced of the correctness of his own views concern­

ing the proper relationship which the West should cultivate with the Arab
states.

To return to the State Department meeting of 25 September, where Akins
held forth so passionately on the plight of the Palestinians and its connexion
with the problems the oil companies were experiencing in Libya. Akins was
inclined to dismiss the companies’ apprehensions about the implications of the
severe increases in oil prices and tax rates which the Libyans had forced upon
Occidental at the beginning of September. Although they constituted the
largest increases in the revenues of a concessionary government to have taken
place for twenty years, Akins thought them no more than ‘reasonable’. ‘It was
also to our interest’, he explained to the oil companies’ representatives, *...

that the companies have a reasonable working relationship with the Libyans
and with other producers. If the Libyans concluded they were being cheated,
this . . . guaranteed a breakdown in relations with the companies and all sorts of
subsequent problems.’ Sir David Barran, the chairman of Shell, promptly took
Akins up on this score. He said that he strongly resented both the categoriza­
tion of the Libyan demands as ‘reasonable’ and the insinuation that the Libyans
were being ‘cheated’, with its underlying suggestion that the companies should
therefore concede these demands. ‘The dangers to our own and the consumers’

interests lay much more in yielding than in resisting the demands being made
upon us . . Barran argued. ‘Our conclusion was that sooner or later we, both
oil company and consumer, would have to face an avalanche of escalating
demands from the producer governments and that we should at least try to
stem the avalanche.’
What the United States government should do, Barran suggested, was to
dare the Libyans to nationalize the companies’ operations in Libya and then
see what happened. Akins was greatly alarmed by the suggestion. ‘If Libya
moves in and takes over the companies,’ he said, ‘Europe, one way or another,
is going to get Libyan oil, and if the companies then try to block the sale 0
Libyan oil, as they said they would, . . . they would find themselves national­

ized in Europe as well.’ It was an entertaining conceit, this forecast of the
nationalization of every American oil company operating in Europe, especi y
as it came from the State Department’s expert on oil and fuels. What ma e it
more intriguing was that Akins, according to his own testimony three years
later, did not feel similar alarm at the prospect of the nationahzauon of
American oil companies by Arab or African or Asian governments. 1 es y