Page 342 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

The Masquerade 339

before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in October 1973, he said: ‘If,
say, country X nationalizes an American company, there is full, prompt and
adequate compensation and this country then sells its oil or its copper or
whatever, we would certainly have no grounds whatsoever to make the protest,
none, and we would not.’*
Was there no way, then, in which pressure could be brought to bear upon the
Libyans to moderate their demands upon the companies? The opinion of the
State Department, as expressed at the meeting of 25 September, was that there
was none. According to the under-secretary of state, Alexis Johnson, the United
States government had little or no influence with the Libyans; its intervention,
he said, would be ‘ineffective at best’. But what if rhe Libyans went so far as to
nationalize the companies’ concessions, and Libyan production was shut down

as a result? Would not the Libyans soon begin to feel the pinch financially?
Akins dismissed the possibility, pointing out that the Libyans had some $2,000
million in reserves which would keep them going for four years, at least. But
surely, he was asked, it was logical to assume that Libyan deposits in American
and European banks would automatically be frozen? ‘It was an assumption’,
Akins later recalled with some satisfaction in an article he wrote for Foreign
Affairs in April 1973, ‘hardly likely to be realized.’ He was equally certain that
the countries of Western Europe would not have been prepared to endure the
hardships which would result from the loss of Libyan oil simply ‘to protect the
Anglo-Saxon oil monopoly, which they had long sought to break’. ‘As for the
possibility of using force (actually suggested since by a handful of imperialists
manques'),' he added with amused condescension, ‘suffice it that it was never for

a moment considered.’
With support like this from their home governments, the oil companies
must have concluded that they scarce had need of the Libyan RCC as enemies.
Every suggestion put forward at the State Department meeting of 25 Sep­
tember of ways in which the companies might fight back was rejected as
impracticable, dangerous or (that most modish of the weasel words of our day)
‘counter-productive’. The State Department would countenance no course of
action except surrender. Yet three years later, in his article in Foreign Affairs,
Akins was indignantly to deny, in the face of all that had flowed in the interim
from the Libyan surrender, ‘that the State Department by its inaction was to
blame for creating a new monster’. ‘The Libyans were competent men in a
strong position,’ he asserted; ‘they played their hand straight, and found it a
winning one.’ It certainly was, seeing that the cards had been obligingly dealt
to them by the State Department. A similar infirmity of spirit pervaded the

British Foreign Office. On his way to Washington in late September, Barran,
For these remarks and those in the foregoing paragraph, see the hearings of the sub-committee on
mu unational corporations of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. One of the most valuable contributions
S° h ^1Car'ngs was narralive of events from the spring of 1970 to the spring of 1971 supplied by Henry Mayer
C Cr Bunker Hunt. I have drawn upon his narrative at length for the account given here of the oil
companies negotiations with the OPEC governments in 1970-1.