38THE OIL AGE ARRIVESproven reserves accounted for more than a quarter of the global
total.^22 Washington wanted to ensure Saudi oil was Free World oil, sus-
taining America’s ideological and economic battle against commu-
nism. The fear was that the Soviet Union, steward of huge oil reserves of
its own, would continue expanding relentlessly southward and take
control of or even subsume these politically weak but oil- rich lands.
Saudi Arabia was also far more accommodating than other producer
states. US relations with Iran, Venezuela, Mexico, and Indonesia were
prickly. Certainly these more developed countries would not brook
similar levels of US involvement in their national affairs.
Aramco, meanwhile, was so tied into the US government that it had
an office in Washington where it could receive guidance from senior
executives who also worked for the CIA. Aramco’s Department of Gov-
ernment Relations was modeled after the State Department, and the
company’s Arabian Affairs Division replicated the State Department’s
intelligence arm, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. The US gov-
ernment depended on Aramco for intelligence on the kingdom.^23 The
political scientist Robert Vitalis portrays Aramco’s Government Rela-
tions Organization as a CIA front and Duce as the oil company’s main
CIA liaison.^24 Col. William Eddy, a longtime US intelligence operative,
interpreted for Ibn Saud during his 1945 meeting with President Frank-
lin D. Roosevelt aboard the USS Quincy. During the 1950s, Eddy worked
for Aramco in the kingdom, acting as a key liaison between the West-
ern oilmen, the US government, and Ibn Saud.^25
In this way, the strategic necessity of maintaining US access to Saudi
oil— and profits for US oil firms— dictated American preference for a pli-
able authoritarian regime. With so much American input, the old- world
desert kingdom even began to look like America. Aramco’s 1952 Riyadh–
Dammam passenger railway stands out as a classic American throw-
back. Designed and built by San Francisco’s Bechtel, the railroad features
four comfortable and spacious train stations built in the WPA style,
embellished with Arab crenellations and archways that resemble open-
ings on a Bedouin tent.^26