By
Charlotte Dennett
-
April 20, 2022
1
Vladimir Putn autographing a natural gas pipeline in Vladivostok in 2011.
[Source:
theguardian.com]
As never before, the connection between war and big power rivalry over
oil and gas in Ukraineand beyondhas become disturbingly tangible to
average citizens, when it was once known only to world leaders, their
militaries and spies, and their wealthy backers. Henry Kissinger, protégé
of Nelson Rockefeller,
once said,
“
you control the oil, you control the world.”
Now, in the United States, where the oil connection has been routinely
suppressed for a century on grounds of national security, the mainstream
media have no choice but to report “breaking news” that all too often has
an energy component to it. But the facts relayed are facts in isolation,
devoid of context.
We’ve all heard about the sinking of Russia’s flagship
Moskva in
the Black Sea, apparently downed by two Ukrainian Neptune missiles. This
was the same vessel that warned Ukrainian soldiers to surrender their
positions on tiny Snake Island, to which one of them replied: “Russian
warship. Go Fuck yourself!” The Western press turned him and his fellow
Ukrainians as heroic matyrs for valiantly resistingbut ultimately
succumbing tothe onslaught of Russian bombs.
Only days later, the world learned that they had survived, having been
taken captive and were later freed in a prisoner exchange. What the world
did not know was that Snake Island (also known as Serpents Island) sits
atop huge gas deposits in the Black Sea and has become “the bone of
contention between Romania, Ukraine and Russia,” according to Le Monde,
and “one of the key points in the war that Moscow is waging against
Kyiv.”
The Russians seized Snake Island on Day One of their invasion of Ukraine.
The same day, the U.S. leveled its first economic target against the $11
billion dollar Russian-owned pipeline, Nord Stream 2 linking Russia to
Germany. N2 had recently been completed despite numerous efforts by the
U.S. since 2017 to prevent this from happening, arguing it would make
Europe even more dependent on Russia for its energy suppliesand would
cost Ukraine billions in lost transit fees earned on aging Russian
pipelines crisscrossing the country.
N2 was intended to supply additional cheap Russian natural gas to Germany
and to markets throughout Europe, where gas reserves are at an all-time
low and prices are skyrocketing. But once Putin ordered the invasion of
Ukraine, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz caved to U.S. pressure, announcing
that he
had suspended its operation.
Source:
laprogressive.com]
By now, the pipeline is no longer news to most people, but the
ramifications of its suspension could have far reaching consequences, as
27 European countries, heavily dependent on Russian energy, are
considering what was once unthinkable: joining the U.S. in
banning imports of Russian oil products.
Putin, a master player in the Great Game, is hitting back by threatening
“unfriendly countries” with having to
pay for Russian natural gas
in rubles, striking a blow to the almighty American
petrodollar.
President Biden, for his part, has warned Americans that they would have
to make a sacrifice with higher gas prices in order to support the
besieged people of Ukraine. Now, to the dismay of climate activists, he
has opened the country’s
strategic reserves for only the third time, this time to pump out one
million gallons a day in order to lower gasoline prices.
Meanwhile, the U.S. is desperately seeking replacement supplies of
natural gas for its frightened European allies that rely on Russia for
40% of its energy needs. The Russian invasion turned out to be a boon for
suppliers of fracked natural gas, which have been
sending massive supplies of LNG by tanker to European ports. But
there are insufficient LNG terminals to take in all the shipped American
gas, forcing Biden to desperately seek additional
supplies from his enemiesVenezuela and Iranas well as greater oil
output from
Saudi Arabia, in return for more U.S. military assistance to its
catastrophic oil and pipeline war in Yemen.
Liquefied natural gas tankers. [Source:
nationalgeographic.com]
Finally, let’s not forget the folly of Russian tanks, stalled along a
long stretch of road, possibly if media reports are to be believed,
because they
ran out of gas! Quite ironic, given that Russia has
plenty of oil, unlike Germany in World War I and World War II, which lost
both wars because it had not secured enough oil to fuel its military. The
sight of black smoke billowing out of bombed fuel depots in Ukraine
serves as a daily reminder of the importance of oil to its largest
consumers: military machines.
Ukrainian driver offers Russian soldiers help after their tank ran out of
fuel. [Source:
mirror.co.uk]
So oiland now natural gaskeep bubbling up as key factors in the war in
Ukraine as it enters its second month. However, most Ukrainians dodging
bombs and artilleryand arguably most global citizensare still asking:
“What’s this war all about?”
Even with the oil and gas issues noted above, the mainstream media
continue to miss an important historical and geopolitical context behind
the war which could give additional reasons for Russia’s invasion of
Ukraine, beyond references to
“
Great Russian Chauvinism”once warned of by Lenin and adopted by
Putinto reclaim the glories of Mother Russia and re-establish the Soviet
Union. Putin’s power is, after all, based on Russia’s enormous reserves
of natural gas, prompting the Brookings Institution to comment as far
back as 2002,
“
Russia is to natural gas what Saudi Arabia is to oil.”
Nord Stream 2 pipeline. [Source:
theconversation.com]
In my comments below, I will suggest that the war in Ukraine may become
known as the Mother of all Energy Wars if the U.S. chooses to escalate by
sending American troops into the fray, risking nuclear war. Keep in mind
that the tactics it has used so far, sending arms into Ukraine, money to
support
jihadist-like mercenaries and beefing up sanctions against Russia,
come from an earlier playbook used most notably to undermine the
pro-Russian regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Not surprisingly Putin
and Assad are retaliating by sending
pro-Assad mercenaries to fight in Ukraine.
Why Context Is Important
In the early 2000s, fellow
investigative journalist Kristina Borjesson asked me to write an essay
about how the media had covered the Iraq war for the paperback edition of
her award-winning book
,
Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free
Press. Kristina knew of my angst over the usual one-sided,
pro-U.S. coverage of both the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and
Iraq in 2003. I had suspected all along that both wars were related to
oil. That’s because, if you’ve lived and reported in the Middle East as I
had, the oil connection to conflict is a no-brainer. But you would never
know it if you followed the mainstream media in the U.S. So proving the
oil connection required deeper digging.
In the course of writing the essay, I came across a statement made by a
world-renowned forensic neuropathologist about the importance of context
in criminal investigations: “Facts in isolation,” said Jan Leesma in an
interview with CNN, “lead to all sorts of questions,” whereas “facts put
in a contextual light enable the investigator to narrow down the
causes.”
My essay would end up with the title “The War on Terror and the Great
Game for Oil: How the Media Missed the Context.” Years later, I would
incorporate my findings and expand on them in a book which has just come
out in paperback titled
Follow the Pipelines: Uncovering the Mystery of a Lost Spy and the
Deadly Politics of the Great Game for Oil.
[Source:
goodreads.com]
Except as otherwise indicated, the sources for this article are all
extensively footnoted in the book.
Historical Context: “Getting the Oil at All Costs”
Winston
Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, made a historic decision in
1911 when he decided to convert the British Navy’s reliance on coal (of
which it had plenty) for its fuel to oil (of which it had none). He
feared, rightly, that the British Empire would have to fight over a “sea
of troubles” to find oil. Getting the oil of Iraq became a “first-class
war aim” for the British during World War I. Once accomplished,
distributing Iraqi oil by pipeline to the port of Haifa on the
Mediterranean Sea became a factor in the 1917 Balfour Declaration that
favored a home for displaced European Jews in Palestine.
During World War II, protecting the oil of Saudi Arabia was yet another
first-class war aimthis time for the Americans. I know because my
father, Daniel Dennett, America’s first master spy in the Middle East,
was tasked with this job as the head of counter-intelligence (X-2) for
the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and later the Central Intelligence
Group (CIG, immediate precursor to the CIA). He died in a mysterious
plane crash in March 1947 following a top-secret mission to Saudi
Arabia.
Daniel Dennett [Source: Charlotte Dennett]
I was an infant then, but 27 years later, when I left my job with the
Beirut Daily Star in 1975 and returned to the U.S. after dodging a
sniper’s bullet on the eve of the Lebanese civil war, I began to
investigate the circumstances surrounding his death. I found a steamer
trunk in the family attic filled with his letters and reports that
revealed his last mission was to determine
and protectthe best
route for the planned Trans-Arabian pipeline.
TAPLINE would carry desperately needed post-war Saudi oil to a terminal
point on the eastern Mediterranean. From there it would be shipped to
ports in Europe, where it would play a major role in turning Europe’s
dependence away from largely Communist-controlled coal unions to
“free-market” oil, aiding to the reconstruction of Europe under the
Marshall Plan. The Cold War was about to begin.
Source: Chelsea Green]
The terminal point, once favored to be Haifa, Palestine, ended up (as my
father recommended, due to instability in Palestine) next door, in
Lebanon.
TAPLINE was, on reflection, just as big a deal back then as the
construction of the Nord Stream Pipeline is today, as both projects were
intimately wound up in the Great Game for Oil between the world’s biggest
Petro Powers: the U.S. and Russia.
“Pipeline for U.S. Adds to Middle East Issues; Oil Concessions
Raise Questions Involving Position of Russia”
This was the
headline accompanying an article I discovered appearing in
The New
York Times on March 2, 1947, two weeks before the plane crash that
killed my father.
The gist of this article was that this $100-million project, running
across “the territories of four Middle Eastern countries,” was the source
of significant consternation and resentment among America’s wartime
allies. Why? Because it heralded the emergence of a major new powerthe
U.S.in the Middle East, a region which had previously been dominated by
the French and British. It also alarmed another rising world power: the
Soviet Union, which
Izvestia predicted (rightly as it turned out)
would augur in an “American system of worldwide military bases.”
The
Times article gave credence to this concern: “
Protection of
that investment,” wrote Clifton Daniel, soon to be son-in law of
President Harry Truman, “and the
military and economic security
that it represented will become one of the prime objectives of American
foreign policy in the area, which has already become a pivot of world
politics and one of the main focal points of rivalry between East and
West.” [Emphases added.]
Clifton Daniel [Source:
alchetron.com]
This single sentence aligned with a declassified statement made by my
father as he headed to Lebanon in 1944, reporting on his expected duties:
“We must protect the [Saudi] oil at all costs,” he said in his otherwise
heavily redacted five-page
Analysis of Work.
Equally intriguing in the
Times article was a map. It revealed
not only the projected route of TAPLINE across the Arabian desert to a
terminal point in Lebanon but the routes of two earlier pipelines built
in the 1930s, one carrying the oil of Iraq to British-controlled
Palestine and the other carrying Iraqi oil to French-controlled
Lebanon.
These pivotal finds early in my investigationmy father’s last report,
the
New York Times piece, and the declassified Analysis of Work
(obtained after I sued the CIA in an FOIA lawsuit) introduced me to
“pipeline politics,” and how they could rapidly descend into all-out war
if pipeline proponents did not get their way.
As monopoly chronicler
Matt Stoller recently wrote regarding Nord Stream 2, “Pipelines ship
energy. They also organize power.” And, if necessary, they can bring
about regime change.
My father’s last report revealed that TAPLINE executive William Lenahan
was frustrated by a highly nationalistic, anti-Zionist Syria refusing to
let the pipeline cross through Syrian territory to terminate in
Palestine.
TAPLINE [Source:
Aramco.com]
The end result? The CIA, in its first-ever coup, in 1949, succeeded in
removing Syrian President Shukri al-Quwatli and replacing him with a
police officer who gave approval for TAPLINE to transit through
Syria.
Shukri al-Quwatli [Source:
wikipedia.org]
Ernest Latham, an American diplomat posted to Saudi Arabia at the time,
commented that TAPLINE had assumed the role of “one of the great arteries
of Empire, the American Empire in the Middle East I mean. Because that’s
in fact what it was.”
And how would it be protected? Not by American troops stationed along its
route as was the usual MO, as I reveal below about Afghanistan and Iraq,
but by a whole nation created not only to be a refuge for European
victims of the Holocaust, but also as the supreme military outpost of the
American Empire in the Middle East: Israel.
Bush’s Oil Wars
Applying a post-9/11 contextual analysis
of the War on Terror, I discovered how the Great Game for Oil had turned
deadly, not only in Afghanistan and Iraq, but in Syria as well. As with
TAPLINE, the military protection of pipelines figured largely in these
conflicts.
Some examples:
*The U. S war in Afghanistan, according to U.S. Assistant Secretary of
State Richard Boucher, was to “stabilize Afghanistan” and to link South
and Central Asia “so the energy [from the Caspian Sea] can flow south.”
How? through a planned Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI)
pipeline. U.S. and Canadian soldiers were sent into Afghanistan to
protect the pipeline route. The pipeline, owned by Unocal (now Chevron),
never reached completion due to continued instability in
Afghanistan.
TAPI pipeline [Source: Ann Linton]
Financial institutions are loathe to support pipeline construction in
areas of conflict. But discussions have resumed now that the U.S. has
exited its troops from Afghanistan, with assurances from the
Taliban that they will protect the pipeline.
[Source:
atlanticcouncil.org]
*The U.S. war in Iraq was designed to turn Israel into a major energy
corridor along the Eastern Mediterranean, beginning with the planned
rebuilding of the Iraq Petroleum Company’s Kirkuk-to-Haifa pipeline that
had been built in the 1930s but was closed during the 1948 Israeli war
for independence. The plans were to overthrow Saddam Hussein and replace
him with an Iraqi exile, Ahmed Chalabi, who favored the pipeline and
created the Iraq WMD myth.
Ahmed Chalabi [Source:
theguardian.com]
American troops were sent first to protect the pumping stations along the
defunct pipeline. It has yet to be rebuilt, again due to instability in
the Middle East, but now that Israel is developing its massive offshore
natural gas deposits in the Mediterranean, it plans to ply Europe with
natural gas through its East-Med pipeline, through Cyprus and
beyond.
[Source: Chelsea Green]
*The so-called civil war in Syria rapidly became a proxy war between the
U.S. and Russia and their respective allies after Syria’s Bashar al-Assad
rejected a proposed pipeline that would have carried natural gas from
Qatar through Syria to Turkeyand on to Europe. He reportedly did so to
avoid upsetting his Russian allies, which saw the pipeline as a threat to
Russia’s copious exports of natural gas to Europe.
Instead, Assad, in 2011, signed a deal for an Iran-Iraq-Syria
pipelinethe so-called “Islamic pipeline” designed to carry Iranian
natural gas through Syria to Europe. This was too much for the U.S.,
especially after he also proposed an ambitious Four Seas pipeline project
that would have fostered a regional alliance between Turkey, Iran, Iraq,
Jordan, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Syria, the countries that lie at the
shores of the Mediterranean Sea, the Red Sea, the Black Sea and the
Persian Gulf. Assad envisioned Syria to be a strategic energy corridor,
an ambition that ran counter to Israel’s similar ambitions.
Qatar, whose pipeline scheme had been rejected by Assad in 2010, by 2013
had spent up to $3 billion, according to the
Financial Times,
“over the past two years supporting the rebellion [against Assad] in
Syria.” ISIS, long believed by locals to be a creation of the U.S., would
soon be receiving “clandestine financial and logistical support” from the
Qatari and Saudi governments, according to a leaked memo from Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton to Obama adviser John Podesta.
[Source:
iraqieconomists.net]
ISIS would lay siege to large portions of the northern Syrian city of
Aleppo that lasted four years. ISIS also moved into eastern Syria, site
of Syria’s largest oil holdings. Who could forget President Trump’s
inartful ordering of U.S. troops to leave Syria, only to quickly reverse
course and order them to stay because “that’s where the oil is.”
A U.S. military armored vehicle drives in a patrol past an oil well in
Rumaylan in Syria’s northeastern al-Hasakah province on November 6, 2019.
[Source:
vox.com]
The Clash of Empires
It is now widely accepted that Syria,
on the brink of collapse, survived regime change by calling in the
Russians for help. In return, Russia was promised a role in the
development of Syria’s offshore oil and gas as well as enlargement of its
only military base on the Mediterranean at the Syrian port of
Tartus.
Putin, meanwhile, continued to monitor Western moves to penetrate Eastern
Europe, aimed in part to bypass Russia’s enormous pipeline systems in
Eastern Europe and the Caucasus region between the Caspian and Black
Seas.
Ever since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the U.S. and its
NATO allies had begun encroaching on former Soviet republics that held
considerable oil and gas deposits. Such incursions were in direct
violation of an agreement between the on-the-brink Soviet Union and NATO
that NATO would not move eastward, “not one inch.”
By 1996, a
New York Times article intriguingly titled
“The Third American Empire” stated that the disintegration of the
Soviet Union “prompted the United States to expand its zone of military
hegemony into Eastern Europe (through NATO) and into formerly neutral
Yugoslavia. Andmost important of allthe end of the cold war has
permitted America to deepen its involvement in the Middle East.”
It took the sleuthing of California attorney and law professor Marjorie
Cohn to recognize the importance of this article while tracking the
activities of Dick Cheney, former CEO of Halliburton before becoming
Bush’s vice president. Halliburton had become one of the world’s largest
providers of products and services to the energy industry and today is
active in 70 countries.
What Cohn discovered was a vast network of Cheney’s oil interests that
extended from the Balkans to the Middle East to the Caspian Sea, which by
the late 1990s was considered the next Middle East. Cheney and his fellow
neocons’ Project for a New American Century, created in 1997 to ensure
that the U.S. would become “the world’s pre-eminent power,” was clearly
up and running when George W. Bush became president.
As it turned out, the U.S., unable to effectuate the TAPI pipeline
eastward through Afghanistan, decided to run a pipeline from Baku
on the
western shores of the Caspian Sea to the Turkish port of
Ceyhan on the Mediterranean Sea.
The result was the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline companya
consortium of eleven energy companies including Chevron, Conoco Phillips
and British Petroleumstarting from the former Soviet republic of
Azerbaijan, passing through Georgia, and terminating in Turkey.
The BTC pipeline was considered the “linchpin of the shift in U.S. energy
policy away from the Middle East.” It was built between 2003 and 2005,
mostly underground, for fear of pipeline sabotage in some of the most
conflict-prone areas of the Caucasus. As precautionary moves, the U.S.
poured military assistance into the three hosting countries to ensure the
safety of the pipeline and the “uninterrupted transport of Caspian oil”
to Europe, completely bypassing Russia.
[Source:
wikipedia.org]
The Russians viewed it as a threat to their gas interests and an effort
“to redraw the geography of the Caucasus on an anti-Russian map.”
Azerbaijan, once firmly cemented in the Soviet Union since Stalin
organized oil workers in Baku, became allied with the West due to heavy
courting by Zbigniew Brzezinski, Putin’s equal in great
gamesmanship.
As President Carter’s national security adviser, Zbig had masterminded
the Soviet Union’s demise in Afghanistan. Though a neo-liberal and
trusted associate of banker David Rockefeller, Zbig shared the neo-cons’
vision of an America gaining complete control of Eurasia, the Middle
East, and the world, becoming the world’s only superpower.
Zbigniew Brzezinski [Source:
theguardian.com]
In 2008, Georgia, by then the “leading recipient of U.S. arms and
equipment in the former Soviet space,” invaded the breakaway Republic of
South Ossetia, and Russia retaliated against Georgia with an unexpected
intensity, causing many to fear
then the start of World War III.
War was averted, interestingly enough, because NATO declined to come to
Georgia’s assistance.
Russia used the resulting peace agreement to formally recognize the
independence of the two breakaway republics adjoining Georgia, South
Ossetia (where the fighting had erupted) and Abkhazia. On the
10
th anniversary of the Russo-Georgia War, Russia was widely
regarded as the victor, using its strategic position in the two
republics, according to oil historian Michael Klare, as “daggers at the
BTC jugular.”
[Source:
georgianjournal.ge]
What emerged from what was then seen as the first war in Europe in the
21
st century was the so-called Medvedev Doctrine, named after
Russia’s then president, which signaled Russia’s determination to protect
its influence in the former Soviet Union, where it had friendly
relations, and to resist any intrusions, especially those sponsored by
the U.S. and NATO.
Dmitri Medvedev [Source:
wikipedia.org]
Russia, according to the Doctrine, “does not accept the primacy of the
United States in the international system.” This, some seven decades
after
Izvestia warned of the U.S. setting up worldwide military
bases, largely to protect its oil interests. Spillover into the Middle
East became apparent when the first world leader the Russians met with
during the war was Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
That Russia was able to emerge as the winner at this stage of the Great
Game was due largely to Putin’s calculation that the U.S. had been
weakened, and its forces overstretched, by its disastrous wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq. He would go on to develop two pipelines to Turkey
beneath the oil-rich Black Sea: The Blue Stream and Turkstream pipelines,
both bypassing Ukraine and protected by Russia’s annexation of
Crimea.
[Source:
ednh.news]
Regime Change?
President Biden’s recent “regime-change
statement” about Putin“For God’s sake: This man cannot remain in
power”has caused an international uproar, but some commentators, like
Washington Post columnist Max Boot, suggest that it was
not a gaffe but an “unequivocal message of support for the brave
Ukrainians who are inflicting grievous casualties on the Russian
invaders.”
Certainly Putin understands that the U.S. wants to topple him, and there
is plenty of evidence that officials in the Biden administration are
supportive of regime change, including Victoria Nuland, the third-ranking
official in the State Department.
Nuland, a neo-conservative who advised Dick Cheney on the war in Iraq,
played a
key
role in the coup that brought down pro-Russian president Viktor
Yanukovych in 2014, as evidenced by a leaked phone conversation with
another State Department official; she has since been
advocating for regime change in Russia.
Victoria Nuland, with Geoffrey Pyatt behind her, famously handing out
cookies to Maidan Square protesters. [Source:
csmonitor.com]
One has to also wonder what role Zbigniew Brzezinski’s son, Mark, is
playing as the recently appointed U.S. ambassador to Poland.
Chip off the old block? Mark Brzezinski. [Source:
wikipedia.org]
There is widespread speculation that the U.S.
set a trap for Putin, with Ukraine as the bait, or, conversely, that
Putin’s own authoritarian rule condemned him to a
“dictator trap” surrounded by yes men who would not tell him the
truth about his ill-advised war. There are also growing concerns that the
days of global economic stability may come to an end due to the
decline of the petro-dollar. History will eventually decide…that is,
if humankind survives.
I conclude by returning to the World War II era when the Trans-Arabian
Pipeline was identified as an “artery of empire,” and my father pledged
to protect it “at all costs.” When we add up the enormous costs since
then, both human and financial, of endless wars in the Middle East,
Afghanistan, and now Ukraine, we can only wonder when the rulers of
empires, goaded by fossil-fuel companies reaping
huge profits, will fall because the costs of their military ambitions
are too unbearable, too ghastlyindeed too apocalypticto endure.