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The Masquerade 347

light. Testifying before a sub-committee of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee three years later, Irwin recalled that he had begun by explaining to
the shah and his ministers ‘that the U S government was not in the oil business
and did not intend to become involved in the details of the producing countries’
negotiations with the oil companies’. He had gone on to say ‘that the United
States had urged the companies to be co-operative and reasonable, and ... that
the companies had already agreed in their message to OPEC of January 16 to
negotiate the substantive demands included in the Caracas OPEC resolutions’.
He had then emphasized that the companies as well as the oil-consuming

countries were worried by the thought of the incessant rounds of price
increases that were bound to follow if the members of OPEC negotiated in
separate geographic groups. Finally, he had pointed out that, as the United
States Department of Justice had not given its permission until 13 January for
the American oil companies to act in unison, the companies had been unable to
commence negotiations before then. They would therefore require more time
to negotiate a settlement than that allowed by the deadline laid down in
OPEC’s Caracas resolutions.
To this the shah and his ministers replied that they considered the
companies’ decision to negotiate en bloc was ‘a most monumental error’. It
meant that the ‘moderate’ members of OPEC (with Persia naturally in the van)

would not be able to restrain the Libyans and Venezuelans, the ‘wild men’, as
Amuzegar called them. Consequently the increase that would eventually
emerge would be the highest common denominator. What would make far
better sense, the shah argued, would be for the companies to adopt the
suggestion made by the Persian representative at the Caracas conference and
conduct separate negotiations with the Gulf members of OPEC, the Mediter­
ranean members and the non-Middle-Eastern members. The greatest import­
ance, so the shah and his ministers contended, attached to the conclusion of a
satisfactory settlement with the Gulf states, since they would be the principal
suppliers of oil to the industrial world in the years to come. The companies
should not require as a condition of arriving at such a settlement that the
rest of OPEC should also subscribe to it. Should they do so, it would be taken
as a sign of‘bad faith’ on their part and ‘serious trouble’ would follow. The Gulf

countries could not impose their will upon Libya, Algeria or Venezuela, and
the companies would be making a grave mistake if they tried to play one
member of OPEC off against another , or to prolong the negotiations unduly. It
was patently obvious, the shah added testily, that this was exactly what the
companies were attempting to do by their insistence upon negotiating with
I EC as a whole. If they were seeking to stir up dissension within the
organization between its ‘moderate’ and ‘radical’ members and thereby to
asten its disintegration, they were, the shah proclaimed grandly, seeking in
vain. OPEC would stand united, even to the point of closing down oil produc­
tion altogether. On the other hand, the shah affirmed (so Irwin later reported),