Saudi Arabia - Discovery! Search for Arabian Oil

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May 31, 2008

Discovery! The Search for Arabian Oil
Wallace Stegner - Foreword by Thomas Lippman

[Originally distributed in SUSRIS e-mail on September 20, 2007 -- Reprinted today to mark the 75th anniversary of Aramco being celebrated this month.]

Editor's Note:

A fascinating account of the early days in the "search for Arabian oil" [was published September 18, 2007] by Selwa Press of California. It is the first publication of Pulitzer Prize winner Wallace Stegner's "Discovery!," written in the 1950s, in the United States, and the story of bringing it to your book store, as Thomas Lippman writes in the book's foreword, "is a complicated and murky tale, almost as interesting as the story recounted in its pages."

SUSRIS is pleased to bring you the foreword from "Discovery!" today and Wallace Stegner's introduction [today]. We suggest you browse the photographs from the early days that Selwa Press has allowed us to post on the SUSRIS Web site.

We thank Tim Barger of Selwa Press for permission to share the foreword, the introduction and the photographs.

For more information on Discovery! and photos from the early days in the search for oil, click here.

Link to purchase the book

Discovery! The Search for Arabian Oil
A Book By Wallace Stegner
Foreword by Thomas Lippman

Wallace Stegner (Photo Courtesy Selwa Press) Go out to your local library or bookstore and take down from the shelf any of the renowned works of Wallace Stegner, one of the most admired American writers of the 20th century. Before the title page there will be a list of his books. There are the great novels: Big Rock Candy Mountain, Crossing to Safety, and Angle of Repose, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. And there is accomplished non-fiction, too, including his biographies of Bernard de Voto and John Wesley Powell, and his late-life personal testament, Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West. What will not appear is any reference to one of Stegner�s most original and offbeat volumes, Discovery! The Search for Arabian Oil. That is because this book has never before been published in the United States and is unknown even to many of Stegner�s fans. A paperback version published in Beirut in 1971 can be found in some libraries, but it is read mostly by students of the early history of modern Saudi Arabia, a limited circle of specialists.

The story of Discovery! and the peculiar fate of Stegner�s manuscript is a complicated and murky tale, almost as interesting as the story recounted in its pages. But the book�s odd history does not detract from its merit as narrative. It is a brisk, muscular and well-reported � if occasionally breathless � account of the creation and development of the oil industry in Saudi Arabia by American geologists and engineers in the 1930s and 1940s, one of the most important developments of modern Middle Eastern history.

Readers unfamiliar with the story of oil or the history of Saudi Arabia may not be aware of the grand and improbable drama that unfolded in the Arabian wasteland after the signing of the first oil exploration agreement in 1933. Stegner brings that drama to life with headlong prose and colorful characters, none of whom he had to invent. Even readers to whom that story might seem old news will find a wealth of new detail, crisply delivered. If nothing else, Discovery! is a tour de force of reporting, because Stegner spent only two weeks in the desert kingdom in 1955, yet through his interviews with oil company people and study of a substantial documentary record he produced a comprehensive narrative.

The country we know as Saudi Arabia was created in 1932 by Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, a warrior prince from a desert tribe who swept across the Arabian peninsula in the early years of the 20th century to establish the family rule of the House of Saud, which continues today. All kings who have followed Abdul Aziz have been his sons.

Abdul Aziz claimed a prize of seemingly dubious value. The country he created is vast but mostly barren, the terrain flinty and inhospitable. In the early 1930s it was one of the poorest and least developed countries on earth, its revenue sources meager, its people mostly illiterate and afflicted with diseases long ago brought under control elsewhere, the barren land uncrossed by roads or power lines. Its importance to the rest of the world lay entirely in its historic position as the homeland of Islam: the Prophet Muhammad�s holy cities of Mecca and Medina were incorporated into Saudi Arabia during Abdul Aziz�s decades of conquest, and pilgrims from around the Muslim world flocked to them each year.

A few adventurers believed, and the King hoped, that the unpromising landscape might contain reserves of oil, for the geology of the eastern region of the kingdom was similar to that of Bahrain, the small island offshore, where oil had been discovered a few years earlier. And so it was in 1933, in the depths of the Great Depression, that Saudi Arabia entered into an oil exploration contract with Standard Oil Company of California, a development that would change the modern world.

The task of mapping the geology of Arabia, finding likely sites to drill, sinking the wells, creating the tanks and pipes and separators and moving the oil to refineries � work performed in harsh conditions, under merciless sun, in a desolate landscape that provided no support, in a place where local workers knew nothing of electricity or machinery and every last nail and bolt and length of wire had to be imported � was carried out by California Arabian Standard Oil Company, or CASOC, a Standard subsidiary. Shortly before the end of World War II, three other major oil companies, Texaco, Exxon and Mobil, joined Chevron (previously Standard Oil Company of California) in a consortium known as the Arabian American Oil Company, or ARAMCO. In 1955 Aramco commissioned Stegner to write this history. By then the early days of geologists camping in tents and traveling by camel were well in Aramco�s past; it was a large industrial enterprise based in an American-style company town, Dhahran, that it had created out of nothing in eastern Saudi Arabia.

Stegner (1909�1993) was by the mid-1950s well established on the faculty of Stanford University, where he ran the creative writing program, but it was a time when his books were not selling well and he needed extra money. Besides, the real-life story of Casoc appealed to Stegner, because it offered some of the favorite themes of his fiction � rugged men on the frontier, the allure of women in remote outposts, the impact on local people of what he calls �industrial civilization.� He saw the oil industry in Saudi Arabia as comparable to the mines and railroads of the American West. �Dhahran� substitutes easily for �Leadville� in this passage from Angle of Repose: �A camp that strikes it rich in the middle of a depression speaks as urgently to the well-trained as to the untrained. In Leadville, Harvard men mucked in prospect holes, graduates of MIT and Yale Sheffield Scientific School worked as paymasters and clerks and gunguards, every mine office was approached daily by some junior engineer with a diploma and a new mustache.. ..Leadville roared toward civilization like a runaway train.�

He made the comparison explicit in evaluating the transformation this �industrial civilization� wrought on Arabia. �Industrial civilization made its way among the Indians of North America in the form of needles, awls, knives, axes, guns, woolen cloth,� he wrote. A similar phenomenon developed in eastern Saudi Arabia when the oil men �began to tinker with the machines that made water and climate, and the smells that drove away the flies. And long before anyone knew the phrase, a revolution of rising expectations had begun. Saudi Arabia would never be the same.

Critics of the oil enterprise and of the way Casoc operated have tended to glamorize the pre-industrial way of life that oil swept away, as if it represented some kind of unspoiled purity, but in three decades of visiting Saudi Arabia I have never met anyone who believed the country was better off without the roads, electricity, running water and schools that oil brought. In all material ways, Stegner�s belief that the discovery of the world�s greatest reserves of crude oil was beneficial to Saudi Arabia is correct.

Stegner begins Discovery! with a description of Jiddah, the city on the Red Sea coast where the painstaking negotiations that led to the oil concession agreement took place. In 1933, Jiddah was a hot, smelly, ramshackle port town without electricity or running water, an environment quite alien to the oilmen, who swallowed their discomfort in pursuit of the prize. �Wearily the duelists fought it out,� Stegner wrote, in bargaining that went on for more than three months, on one side frustrated Americans, on the other the King�s representatives who were, as Stegner notes, �hardheaded, smart, patient, tenacious, wary . . . bargainers worthy of anyone�s steel.�

In those words Stegner shows his appreciation for one of the unlikely but inescapable truths about the early agreement between a giant corporation from the United States � the world�s greatest industrial and economic power � and Saudi Arabia, which was at the opposite pole of human development. This was that the relationship was not so unequal as it might seem, because each side had something the other very much wanted: Saudi Arabia had the oil, the Americans had the capital and the technology required to produce it and get it to market. Different as they were culturally and materially, they needed each other. The Americans were not colonizers; they entered Saudi Arabia by invitation, not at gunpoint, and at any time they could be asked to leave.

Readers of Discovery! will find it populated by colorful characters who might have been sent by Central Casting: the bearded, rough-and-ready American geologists and engineers sweating and shouting as their cars sank in the sand, the shrewd Saudi finance minister Abdullah Suleiman, the impetuous Krug Henry and his whirlwind romance with a young Lebanese woman, the intrepid young guide known as Khamis, the spunky Anita Burleigh, the first American woman to travel across the country and meet the King. These characters appealed to Stegner�s view of how frontier lands were brought into the modern era through the grit, determination, patience and courage of strong men and loyal women. And his account of Casoc�s greatest moment of tragedy, the lethal explosion and fire that consumed Well No. 12 in 1939, makes a gripping narrative all by itself.

Stegner�s account of how the relationship among these characters grew and prospered is largely favorable to the company, as would be expected in a commissioned work, but it does not ignore the disputes that inevitably arose between host and guest, or the dissatisfaction of the local workers. In the oil fields, Stegner observed, �the contact was man to man, and since each man was the product of a culture profoundly different from that which had formed the other there were inevitable incidents of misunderstanding, prejudice, conflicting notions of law and justice.�

Commissioning Wallace Stegner to write an approved history of the oil venture�s early days � a history that would accentuate the positive and show the oil company in a favorable light � was only one element of an extensive public relations effort that Aramco carried on for decades. The firm financed the production of a full-length pseudo-documentary film, Arabia: Island of Allah, that celebrated the feats of King Abdul Aziz and the material progress that came with oil. Fredric March was the narrator. A handbook for employees was expanded into a handsome coffee-table book, Aramco and Its World, and made available in the United States and Europe. It told the history of the oil patch, but it also celebrated Islamic history and culture. The company created a glossy magazine, Aramco World, to advance the same values.

Any serious business venture makes some investment in public relations, and Aramco�s made sense in the context of the 1950s, when Aramco and its parent companies in the United States had ample reason to try to burnish the company�s image, support the U.S.-Saudi alliance and present the American record in Saudi Arabia in the best light. Discontent over living conditions and wages was breeding agitation among the Arab workers. Iran, just across the Gulf, nationalized its oil industry in 1951, putting the idea of a state takeover in play throughout the region.

After the Egyptian revolution of 1952, the fiery Gamal Abdel Nasser, a secular populist, began denouncing Saudi Arabia and the House of Saud�s arrangements with the oil company. Since Aramco could retain the concession only if the House of Saud remained in power and looked with favor upon the oil company, Aramco�s executives rightly viewed public relations as an important tool of corporate diplomacy.

And therein lay the root of their problem with Stegner�s manuscript. He confronted the same difficulty faced by every artist who creates not because he is moved to do so but because some patron is paying him and will demand a suitable product. Stegner believed in the merits of the early oil men, believed in their energy, foresight and good will. He believed that the development of the oil industry was beneficial to Saudi Arabia and its people. But he also believed in his own honesty, and wished his narrative to be sufficiently credible and accurate to justify putting his name on it.

Writing at a furious pace, Stegner completed a draft manuscript within a few months after his visit to Saudi Arabia and sent it to Aramco�s New York office in March 1956. That was a tumultuous year in the Middle East � Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, and Israel, Britain and France went to war against Egypt � and the senior people at Aramco were preoccupied by those events and by King Saud�s visit to the United States. Stegner heard nothing about his manuscript for the rest of the year. Inside Aramco, however, discomfort was brewing over what he had submitted.

Stegner felt that honesty compelled him to raise some issues that the company did not want ventilated in public. Company officials, who were paying for this project, understandably wanted to present a positive image that would please, or at least not offend, their Saudi hosts. Throughout 1957, Aramco executives haggled with Stegner over revisions to the manuscript. Stegner finally let his frustration spill over in a long letter to H. O. Thompson, an Aramco vice president, on January 24, 1958.

�This kind of book may be either of two things: It may be frankly a �Company history,� written by Company employees according to Company specification and published with the Company�s backing or at the Company�s expense,� he wrote. �This makes it, essentially, a public relations job. Or it may be a book written by an outside observer, with more or less cooperation from the Company and with greater or less access to its records, but representing his interpretation of people and events and published under his name and at his responsibility. Done on this basis, its aim is the truth of history insofar as its author can attain it, and not the immediate and uncritical promotion of Company purposes and prestige.

�What we have been doing so far, I am afraid, is straddling two stools � having me, as a consultant on the Company�s payroll, do a book that will represent my best understanding of Aramco�s first ten years in Arabia, and that may be published under my name, but that at the same time will be satisfactory to the company and subject to its approval or disapproval.� In the end, neither party ever got entirely what it wanted.

In March 1959, Thomas C. Barger, who began with Casoc as a geologist in the early days and rose to be chief executive of Aramco, wrote in a letter to another company official that while he had no problems with the manuscript upon a first reading, his unease had been growing for some time. He said he and another senior executive could not see how publication would advance Aramco�s interests. �If you concur,� he concluded, �we would both be well pleased if the manuscript were put into the files, to be looked at ten years from now.�

Nothing more was heard of the manuscript until 1967, when it was unearthed by Paul Hoye, a young journalist who was just beginning a two-decade career as editor of Aramco World. With Stegner�s assent, the manuscript � largely purged of material that had alarmed Aramco executives � was published in the magazine in fourteen installments.

Those became the fourteen chapters of a paperback book edition that was published in Beirut in 1971. That edition carried a notation that the text was �as abridged for Aramco World magazine,� which was unnecessary because no other version had ever appeared, and this served only to alert readers that something might be missing.

The cover copy of the Beirut version said that Stegner was �an author, teacher, critic and conservationist. Born and raised amid the plains and hills of the American West � Iowa, North Dakota, Montana and Nevada � he drew from his experiences there the deep respect for and perceptive knowledge of nature, and people close to nature, explicit in such books as The Big Rock Candy Mountain, All the Little Live Things, and The Sound of Mountain Water.�

Stegner not only assented to publication of this version, he also supplied a new introduction for the paperback edition. In it, he dismissed critics of the American role in Saudi Arabia as �hostile propagandists� and praised the �spirit of goodwill and generosity toward the Saudi Arabs as people� that he found among the Aramco personnel.

Aramco was nationalized in stages during the 1970s and has been fully state-owned for many years. Its senior executives are all Saudi Arabs, most of them products of the training programs that Aramco put in place half a century ago. The American oil companies that created Aramco still operate some facilities in the kingdom, such as refineries and lube oil plants, although they no longer have any concessionary status and must compete for contracts against all the other companies of the world. But Dhahran is still an American-style company town, the business climate there is entirely American, and the Saudi Arabs who run the enterprise tend to speak of their American mentors with respect and even affection. They concur with the verdict Stegner delivered in his introduction to the Beirut edition of Discovery! � that �American oil development in the Middle East has been, all things considered, responsible and fair.�

Thomas W. Lippman

For more information on Discovery! and photos from the early days in the search for oil, click here.

Link to purchase the book

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ABOUT THOMAS W. LIPPMAN

Thomas W. Lippman is a former Middle East correspondent and a diplomatic and national security reporter for The Washington Post (1966-1999, 2003). He covered the war in Iraq for The Washington Post�s online edition in 2003. He appears frequently on radio and television as a commentator on Middle Eastern affairs.

He is the author of several books about the Middle East and American foreign policy, including "Inside the Mirage: America�s Fragile Partnership with Saudi Arabia" (2004), "Madeleine Albright and the New American Diplomacy" (2000), "Egypt After Nasser" (1989) and "Understanding Islam" (1995). He has also written on these subjects for several magazines, including The Middle East Journal, SAIS Review and US News and World Report.

His latest book on the Middle East, "Arabian Knight: Colonel Bill Eddy, USMC and the Rise of American Power in the Middle East," will be published in 2008. Lippman is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

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THOMAS LIPPMAN ON SUSRIS

Book Description (from Amazon.com)

Illuminating a little-known but extremely significant period in world history�the discovery of oil in the Middle East and the beginnings of what is now the Saudi Arabian Oil Company (Saudi Aramco)�this captivating history explores the birth of the Middle Eastern oil industry. From the king and his royal court to the desert guides, scientists, and mechanics who built the original oil company, Aramco, the distant and desperately poor world of Depression-era Saudi Arabia is vividly brought to life. Written more than 50 years ago, this detailed account serves as a kind of time capsule and features the author�s prescient insights into the cultural and technological consequences of King Ibn Saud�s deliberate decision to choose America as his commercial ally.

Link to purchase the book

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