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The Masquerade 371

have wondered whether they had heard aright, and if this was the same man
who only eleven months earlier had told the House Committee on Foreign
Affairs that he expected the Tehran and Tripoli agreements on prices to run
their full five years.
A nod was as good as a wink to the magnates of OPEC. At the end of June
they met in Vienna and drew up an ultimatum to the oil companies. If the
exchanges between the companies and the governments of the oil-exporting
countries failed to arrive at a satisfactory settlement of the terms on which
compensation for participation was to be assessed and the prices at which the
governments’ share of oil production was to be bought back by the companies,
OPEC would take ‘definite concerted action’ to force a settlement. Two

months later, in the last week of September, Ahmad Zaki al-Yamani warned a
gathering of oilmen in London that the choice before them was simply
‘nationalization or participation’. The latter, he added disarmingly, was ‘our
substitute for nationalization’. As the warning was not well taken, Yamani felt
obliged to sweeten it by assuring his audience that any participation agreement
would extend, without any renegotiation, for the designated life of existing oil
concessions, i.e. to the end of the century or beyond. A few days later, in an
address at the Middle East Institute in Washington (which served more or less

as ARAMCO’s regimental chapel), he put forward a visionary scheme of an
enduring partnership between the United States and Saudi Arabia in their
respective roles as the world’s largest consumer and the world’s largest pro­
ducer of crude oil. In return for the lifting of all taxes upon the importation of
Saudi oil into the United States, Yamani proposed, Saudi Arabia not only
would supply as much oil as the United States required but would, in addition,
invest money in the American oil industry, more particularly in its ‘down­
stream’ operations.
The proposal was not exactly a spur-of-the-moment inspiration. Some time
previously, in testimony given before a committee of the United States Senate
m February 1972, James Akins, in his capacity as director of the office of fuels

and energy in the State Department, had assured the committee that the
United States could confidently rely upon stable and secure supplies of oil from
Saudi Arabia. Talks between Yamani and ARAMCO since the beginning of
the year had resulted in the concession by ARAMCO of Saudi participation in
its operations in return for assurances regarding future levels of oil production.
Thus, when Yamani made his big splash in Washington in September he was
already aware of the temperature of the water. The other purpose of his mission
to the United States was to conclude a general participation agreement on
behalf of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and Abu Dhabi w'ith the parent com­

panies of ARAMCO (Esso, SOCAL, Texaco and Mobil) and the other majors
operating in the four Gulf States. The agreement was signed on 5 October. It
provided for 25 per cent government participation in existing concessions,
starting in 1973, and rising by stages to 51 per cent participation by 1983.