Part Two

excerpted from the book

A Century of War

Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order

by William Engdahl

Pluto Press, 2004, paperback (original edition 1992)

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In 1919, following the Versailles peace conference, the British Empire was at its largest extent, its dominion covering one quarter the entire surface of the world, the empire 'upon which the sun never set.' A mere 30 years later, by 1949, the British Empire was disintegrating in every region as demands for colonial independence were made against the oppressive mother country. The British Empire was in the throes of the largest upheaval of perhaps any empire in history.

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Britain was utterly dependent on the postwar [WWII] support of the United States. For its part, the United States, or rather, the internationalist elements of the 'East Coast establishment' as it was becoming known, realized that if America were to dominate the postwar world, it needed the vast worldwide expertise and cooperation of London. The long-discussed new concept of empire, first introduced in the years before the First World War by Lord Lothian, Lord Miler, Cecil Rhodes and the Round Table circle ... was rapidly becoming reality. Britain after 1945 would exert global influence indirectly, through developing and deepening a 'special relationship' with the United States.

The seeds of this special relationship had been carefully planted following Versailles, with the simultaneous establishment of the Royal Institute of International Affairs and the New York Council on Foreign Relations as conduits of strategic policy debate.

Anglo-American petroleum interests emerged from the Second World War in a position of enormously increased power. In the final agreement for a postwar 'New World Order' in monetary and economic affairs, hammered out between British and American negotiators in 1944 at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, Anglo-American hegemony over world petroleum played a central role in the thinking of Lord Keynes and his American counterpart, Harry Dexter White, assistant U.S. Treasury secretary.

The Bretton Woods system was to be built around the 'three pillars' of the International Monetary Fund, whose member-country contributions would constitute an emergency reserve available in times of balance-of-payments distress; the World Bank, which would grant loans to member governments for large public projects; and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), designed to create a managed agenda of 'free trade.'

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Bretton Woods created what was called a gold exchange system. Under this system, each member country's national currency was pegged to the U.S. dollar. The U.S. dollar was in turn set at an official rate of $35 per fine ounce of gold, the rate set by President Roosevelt in 1934, during the depths of the Great Depression, and before a world war.

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Because the New York Federal Reserve Bank had accumulated the bulk of the world's official gold reserves during the war, and because the dollar emerged from the ravages of the war as the world's strongest currency, backed by what was unquestionably the world's strongest economy, few were in a position to argue with what amounted to a postwar U.S. dollar standard.

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A little-noted consequence of the extraordinary global market grab by the major American oil companies following the Second World War was the parallel rise to international dominance of the New York banking groups tied to oil.

... The New York banks had traditionally been oriented toward international business, but they now held disproportionate power over world finance, as never before. Their power resembled that of the old London imperial banking groups such as Midland Bank, Barclays, and the like. By 1961, the deposits concentrated into the five largest New York banks were fully 75 per cent of all bank deposits of the entire metropolitan region, America's largest economic region.

The membership of the increasingly influential New York Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) during the 1950s, also reflected this concentration of financial and economic power. The CFR chairman was the Wall Street lawyer John J. McCloy, also chairman of Chase Bank and a former lawyer for the Rockefeller Standard Oil interests.

While most Americans only dimly realized the ominous implications of the concentration of economic and financial power into a small number of hands in New York banks, corporations and related law firms during the early postwar years in the 1950s, the point was not lost on their British cousins in the City of London.

American society was increasingly being reshaped along the lines of the British 'informal empire,' with finance, raw materials control, and control of international terms of trade as its underpinning, rather than the traditional American foundation of technological and industrial progress.

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While Washington had initially encouraged the creation of a European Common Market, in order to provide a more efficient market for American industrial and capital exports, the last thing certain circles in the Anglo-American establishment wanted was a politically and economically independent Continental Europe. This problem took on a sinister new twist when, beginning in late 1957, the United States underwent the first phase of a deep, persisting postwar economic recession, with resulting industrial stagnation and growing unemployment-a recession which lasted into the mid 1960s.

The fundamental causes for the recession were not difficult to foresee, had anyone seriously sought them. The vast amount of investment into industrial plant and equipment, which had lifted the U.S. economy out of the 1930s depression, had taken place almost two decades earlier, during the wartime industrial buildup of 193943. By 1957, plant and equipment, as well as labor-force skill levels, needed to be rejuvenated with more modern resources. The United States in the late 1950s faced the demand of a huge reinvestment into its productive labor force, education system and technology base, if she were to continue to be the world's leading industrial economy. But, sadly for the United States and the rest of the world, leading U.S. policy circles ensured that precisely the wrong policy alternative dominated Washington in the wake of the 1957 recession.

A debate took place within U.S. policy circles over how to respond to the crisis. The New York Council on Foreign Relations, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and others drafted policy options. An ambitious young Harvard professor named Henry Kissinger became an appendage of the Rockefeller group at this time.

The issue was what to do about the deeper implications of the U.S. recession. The natural demand of industry and farmers for cheap credit and technological progress and capital investment was overshadowed by the powerful combination of the liberal East Coast establishment... by the end of the 1950s New York banks had merged into enormously powerful concentrations of financial power and were looking far beyond American shores for sources of their profits.

A decisive voice in this debate was the chairman of the New York Council on Foreign Relations, John J. McCloy. McCloy personally brought Kissinger down from Harvard in the late 1950s, to shape the policy options being readied for the nation by the 'Wise Men' of McCloy's Council on Foreign Relations. McCloy, a Wall Street lawyer, was at the time chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank.
Chase Manhattan ... was the bank of 'Big Oil.' The large U.S. oil multinationals and their New York bankers viewed the entire world market as their domain in the 1950s, not the narrow confines of the United States. Saudi Arabia, in a certain sense, was more 'strategic' for them than Texas...

The post-1957 U.S. policy debate was tilted to the advantage of the international banks of Lower Manhattan and Wall Street, through the influential national television and newspaper media which they controlled. Their control of then-emerging network television, centered in New York, where it enjoyed intimate links with the big international banks ... and their control over select news media such as the New York Times, were central to the success of these New York interests in promoting policies which went directly counter to the best interests of the nation and its citizens at this critical turn. It was in this period that these interests were popularly identified as the liberal East Coast establishment.

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Henry Ford once stated that he would gladly pay the highest wages in industry, sell the world's cheapest car, and in the process become the world's richest man - all by using the most modern technology. Unfortunately, by the early 1960s most influential voices in the U.S. policy establishment had forgotten Ford's lesson. They were too obsessed with making a 'quick buck' by the typical merchant's game of 'buy cheap, sell dear.' By the end of the 1950s, the U.S. establishment had walked away from investment in rebuilding American cities, from educating a more skilled labor force and from investing in more modern factory production and improving the national economy. Instead, their dollars flowed out of the United States to grab up, 'on the cheap,' already-operating industrial companies in western Europe, South America or the emerging economies of Asia.

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With higher interest rates to be earned abroad by buying up operating western European companies on the cheap, New York bankers began to turn their back on the United States. Europe was suffering a huge shortage of capital because of the war and the collapse of industry. As a result, Europe was forced to pay excessively high interest rates to attract the only 'international' currency then available - U.S. dollars from the large New York banks.

For their part, Chase Manhattan, Citibank and the others took the chance to make windfall profits in Europe, often doubling what their money would have earned if they had invested in municipal bonds to rebuild U.S. sewage systems, bridges or housing stock. The problem was that Washington, fearful of alienating the powerful New York financial community, refused to address this vital problem in any serious way. The money fled U.S. shores for higher profits abroad.

By early 1957, for the first time since the Second World War, funds began to flow out of the United States in amounts greater than those coming in. During the period 1957 to 1965, U.S. annual net capital export into western Europe mushroomed from less than $25 billion to more than $47 billion, a staggering sum at the time.

But if it were only American dollars which were leaving U.S. shores, that would have been one problem. The added problem was that U.S. gold reserves also began what became, increasingly after 1958, a continuous and at times precipitous decline. The breakdown of the postwar Bretton Woods monetary system was rapidly approaching, but American policy makers refused to take heed. They were listening to the voices of the New York banks, the big oil companies and the large American corporations, which were beginning, after the 1957 recession, to turn to cheap labor production outside the United States to improve their profit margins.

By the end of the 1950s, what had been the overwhelming advantage of the postwar Bretton Woods system, the United States dollar as the world's reserve currency, had turned into a liability with a vengeance. As western Europe began to achieve independent industrial stature again, with far higher rates of productivity than the aging U.S. economy, this only dramatized the growing weakness of the U.S. economic position by the time of President Kennedy's inauguration in early 1961.

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... Washington, under the growing influence of the powerful New York banking community, refused to play by the very rules it had imposed on its allies in 1944 [Bretton Woods]. New York banks began to invest abroad in new sources of higher profits. The failure of Washington effectively to challenge this vast outflow of vital investment capital, under both Eisenhower and his Democratic successor, Kennedy, was at the center of a problem which turned the decade of the 1960s into a succession of ever worsening international monetary crises.

What New York's international bankers were not eager to advertise was the fact that they were earning huge profits by walking away from investing in America's future. Between 1962 and 1965, U.S. corporations in western Europe earned between 12 and 14 per cent return, according to a January 1967 presidential report to Congress. The same dollar investment in U.S. industry earned less than half of that!

The banks quietly lobbied Washington to keep their game going. They kept their dollars in Europe rather than repatriating the profits to invest in American development. This was the beginning of what came to be known as the Eurodollar market. It was to be the cancer which, by the late 1970s, threatened to destroy its entire host-the world monetary system.

It would, of course, have been far better for the nation, and also for the rest of the world, had the U.S. Congress and the White House insisted on tax and credit policies to channel those billions, at fair rates of return, into new U.S. plant and equipment, advanced technologies, transportation infrastructure, modernization of the rotting rail system, and developing the untapped industrial market potential of the Third World for U.S. industrial exports. More sensible for the nation perhaps, but not for the power of certain influential New York banks.

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Volumes have been written since the tragic Vietnam war about the reasons and causes for it. But, on one level, it was clear that a significant faction of the American defense industry and New York finance had encouraged the decision of Washington to go to war, despite its absurd military justification and a divisive domestic reaction, because the military buildup offered their interests a politically saleable excuse to revive a massive diversion of U.S. industry into the production of defense goods. More and more during the 1960s, the heart of the U.S. economy was being transformed into a kind of military economy, in which the cold war against communist danger was used to justify tens of billions of dollars of spending. The military spending became the backup for the global economic interests of the New York financial and oil interests, another echo of nineteenth-century British Empire, dressed in the garb of twentieth-century anticommunism.

The Vietnam war strategy was deliberately designed by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, with Pentagon planners and key advisers around Lyndon Johnson, to be a 'no-win war' from the onset, in order to ensure a prolonged buildup of this defense component of the economy. The American voter, Washington reasoned, would accept large costs for a new war against an alleged 'godless encroachment of communism' in Vietnam, despite the gaping U.S. budget deficits, if this produced local jobs in defense plants.

Under the Bretton Woods rules, by inflating the dollar through huge spending deficits at home, Washington, in effect, could force Europe and other trading partners to 'swallow' this U.S. war cost in the form of cheapened dollars. So long as the United States refused to devalue the dollar against gold to reflect the deterioration of U.S. economic performance since 1944, Europe had to pay the cost by accepting dollars at the same ratio as it had some 20 years before.

To finance the enormous deficits of his Great Society program and the Vietnam buildup during the 1960s, Johnson, fearful of losing votes if he raised taxes, simply printed dollars, by selling more U .S. Treasury bonds to finance the deficits. In the early 1960s, the U .S. federal budget deficit averaged approximately $3 billion annually. It hit an alarming $9 billion in 1967 as the war costs soared, and by 1968 it reached a staggering $25 billion.

The European central banks began to accumulate large dollar accounts during this period, which they used as official reserves, the so-called Eurodollar accumulation abroad. Ironically, Washington in 1961 had requested that U.S. allies in Europe and Japan, the Group of Ten countries, should ease the drain on U.S. gold reserves by retaining their growing U.S. dollar reserves instead of redeeming the dollars for U.S. gold, as mandated under Bretton Woods.

The European central banks earned interest on these dollars by investing in U.S. government treasury bonds. The net effect was that the European central banks thereby 'financed' the huge U.S. deficits of the 1960s Vietnam debacle.

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... on November 22, 1963, john E Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. New Orleans Judge Jim Garrison, at the time involved in investigating leads to the assassination in his capacity as New Orleans district attorney, years later continued to insist that the murder had been carried out by the CIA, with the aid of select organized crime figures, including Carlos Marcello. Kennedy had among other things been on the verge of pulling out from Vietnam, after talks with the former general Douglas A. MacArthur days before his murder, a policy shift confirmed by his close friend and adviser Arthur Schlesinger.

The reasons for the assassination of John F. Kennedy have been a subject of much speculation. But what is clear is that the young president was moving on a variety of strategic fronts to establish his own mold for US policy, in a direction which, in issue after issue, began to run at odds with the powerful financial and political interests controlling the liberal East Coast establishment.

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LBJ ... escalated Vietnam from a CIA 'technical advisory,' in a full-scale military conflict, pouring tens of billions of dollars and 500,000 uniformed men into a self-defeating war in southeast Asia. The war kept Wall Street bond markets busy financing a record level of U.S. Treasury debt, while select defense-related U.S. companies kept their profits flowing from the Asian campaign.

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The president of the United States announced formal suspension of dollar convertibility into gold [August 15, 1971], effectively putting the world fully onto a dollar standard with no gold backing, thereby unilaterally ripping apart the central provision of the 1944 Bretton Woods system. No longer could foreign holders of U.S. dollars redeem their paper for U.S. gold reserves.

... The real architects of the Nixon strategy were in the influential City of London merchant banks. Sir Siegmund Warburg, Edmond de Rothschild, Jocelyn Hambro and others saw a golden opportunity in Nixon's dissolution of the Bretton Woods gold standard that summer of 1971. London was once again to become a major center of world finance, and again on 'borrowed money,' this time American Eurodollars.

After August 1971, the dominant U.S. policy under the White House national security adviser, Henry A. Kissinger, was to control, not to develop, economies throughout the world. U.S. policy officials began proudly calling themselves 'neo-Malthusians.' Population reduction in developing nations, rather than technology transfer and industrial growth strategies, became the dominating priority during the 1970s, yet another throwback to nineteenth-century British colonial thinking.

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In May 1973 ... a group of 84 of the world's top financial and political insiders met at Saltsjöbaden, Sweden, the secluded island resort of the Swedish Wallenberg banking family. This gathering of Prince Bernhard's Bilderberg group heard an American participant, Walter Levy, outline a 'scenario' for an imminent 400 per cent increase in OPEC petroleum revenues. The purpose of the secret Saltsjobaden meeting was not to prevent the expected oil price shock, but rather to plan how to manage the about-to-be-created flood of oil dollars, a process U.S. Secretary of State Kissinger later called 'recycling the petrodollar flows.'

The American speaker to the Bilderberg on Atlantic-Japanese energy policy, was clear enough. After stating the prospect that future world oil needs would be supplied by a small number of Middle East producing countries, the speaker declared, prophetically: 'The cost of these oil imports would rise tremendously, with difficult implications for the balance of payments of consuming countries. Serious problems would be caused by unprecedented foreign exchange accumulations of countries such as Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi.' The speaker added, 'A complete change was underway in the political, strategic and power relationships between the oil producing, importing and home countries of international oil companies and national oil companies of producing and importing countries.' He then projected an OPEC Middle East oil revenue rise, which would translate into just over 400 per cent.

... in order to tilt the balance of power back to the advantage of Anglo-American financial interests and the dollar ... they determined to use their most prized weapon - control of the world's oil flows. Bilderberg policy was to trigger a global oil embargo, in order to force a dramatic increase in world oil prices. Since 1945, world oil had by international custom been priced in dollars, since American oil companies dominated the postwar market. A sudden sharp increase in the world price of oil, therefore, meant an equally dramatic increase in world demand for U.S. dollars to pay for that necessary oil.

Never in history had such a small circle of interests, centered in London and New York, controlled so much of the entire world's economic destiny. The Anglo-American financial establishment had resolved to use their oil power in a manner no one could have imagined possible. The very outrageousness of their scheme was to their advantage, they clearly reckoned.

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On October 6, 1973, Egypt and Syria invaded Israel, igniting what became known as the Yom Kippur War. Contrary to popular impression, the 'Yom Kippur' War was not the simple result of miscalculation, blunder or an Arab decision to launch a military strike against the state of Israel. The entire constellation of events surrounding the outbreak of the October War was secretly orchestrated by Washington and London, using the powerful secret diplomatic channels developed by Nixon's national security adviser, Henry Kissinger. Kissinger effectively controlled the Israeli policy response through his intimate relation with Israel's Washington ambassador, Simcha Dinitz. In addition, Kissinger cultivated channels to the Egyptian and Syrian side. His method was simply to misrepresent to each party the critical elements of the other, ensuring the war and its subsequent Arab oil embargo.

U.S. intelligence reports, including intercepted communications from Arab officials confirming the buildup for war, were firmly suppressed by Kissinger, who was by then Nixon's intelligence 'czar.' The war and its aftermath, Kissinger's infamous 'shuttle diplomacy,' were scripted in Washington along the precise lines of the Bilderberg deliberations in Saltsjobaden the previous May, some six months before the outbreak of the war. Arab oil-producing nations were to be the scapegoats for the coming rage of the world, while the Anglo-American interests responsible stood quietly in the background.

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One enormous consequence of the ensuing 400 percent rise in OPEC oil prices was that investments of hundreds of millions of dollars by British Petroleum, Royal Dutch Shell and other Anglo-American petroleum concerns in the risky North Sea could produce oil at a profit. It is a curious fact of the time that the profitability of these new North Sea oilfields was not at all secure until after the OPEC price rise.

... the oil crisis hit full force in late 1973, just as the president of the United States was becoming personally embroiled in what came to be called the 'Watergate affair,' leaving Henry Kissinger as de facto president, running U.S. policy during the crisis.

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The U.S. Treasury, under Jack Bennett, the man who had helped steer Nixon's fateful August 1971 dollar policy, had established a secret accord with the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency, SAMA, finalized in a February 1975 memo from U.S. Assistant Treasury Secretary Jack F. Bennett to Secretary of State Kissinger. Under the terms of the agreement, a sizeable part of the huge new Saudi oil revenue windfall was to be invested in financing the U.S. government deficits. A young Wall Street investment banker with the leading London-based Eurobond firm of White Weld & Co., David Mulford, was sent to Saudi Arabia to become the principal 'investment adviser' to SAMA; he was to guide the Saudi petrodollar investments to the correct banks, naturally in London and New York. The Bilderberg scheme was operating just as planned.

Kissinger, as Nixon's all-powerful national security adviser already firmly in control of all U.S. intelligence estimates, secured control of U.S. foreign policy as well, persuading Nixon to name him secretary of state in the weeks just prior to the outbreak of the October Yom Kippur War. Indicative of his central role in events, Kissinger retained both titles, as head of the White House National Security Council and as secretary of state, something no other individual has ever done, before or since. No other single person during the last months of the Nixon presidency wielded as much absolute power as did Henry Kissinger. To add insult to injury, Kissinger was given the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize.

Following a meeting in Teheran on January 1, 1974, a second price increase of more than 100 per cent brought OPEC benchmark oil prices to $11.65. This was done on the surprising demand of the Shah of Iran, who had been secretly put up to it by Henry Kissinger. Only months earlier, the Shah had opposed the OPEC increase to $3.01 for fear that this would force Western exporters to charge more for the industrial equipment the Shah sought to import for Iran's ambitious industrialization. The support of Washington and the West for Israel in the October War had fed OPEC anger at the meetings. Even Kissinger's own State Department had not been informed of his secret machinations with the Shah.

From 1949 until the end of 1970, Middle East crude oil prices had averaged approximately $1.90 per barrel. They had risen to $3.01 in early 1973, at the time of the fateful Saltsjöbaden meeting of the Bilderberg group, which discussed an imminent 400 per cent future rise in OPEC's price. By January 1974, that 400 per cent increase was a fait accompli.

The social impact of the oil embargo on the United States in late 1973 could be described as panic. Throughout 1972 and early 1973, the large multinational oil companies, led by Exxon, had pursued a curious policy of creating a short supply of domestic crude oil. They were allowed to do this under an unusual series of decisions made by President Nixon on the advice of his aides. When the embargo hit in November 1973, therefore, the impact could not have been more dramatic.

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While Kissinger's 1973 oil shock had a devastating impact on world industrial growth, it had an enormous benefit for certain established interests - the major New York and London banks, and the Seven Sisters oil multinationals of the United States and Britain. By 1974, Exxon had overtaken General Motors as the largest American corporation in gross revenues. Her sisters, including Mobil, Texaco, Chevron and Gulf, were not far behind.

The bulk of the OPEC dollar revenues, Kissinger's 'recycled petrodollars,' was deposited with the leading banks of London and New York, the banks which dealt in dollars as well as international oil trade. Chase Manhattan, Citibank, Manufacturers Hanover, Bank of America, Barclays, Lloyds, Midland Bank-all enjoyed the windfall profits of the oil crisis.

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Beginning in the 1970s, an awesome propaganda offensive was launched from select Anglo-American think tanks and journals, intended to shape a new 'limits to growth' agenda, which would ensure the 'success' of the dramatic oil shock strategy. The American oilman present at the May 1973 Saltsjöbaden meeting of the Bilderberg group, Robert 0. Anderson, was a central figure in the implementation of the ensuing Anglo-American ecology agenda. It was to become one of the most successful frauds in history.

Anderson and his Atlantic Richfield Oil Co. funneled millions of dollars through their Atlantic Richfield Foundation into select organizations to target nuclear energy. One of the prime beneficiaries of Anderson's largesse was a group called Friends of the Earth, which was organized in this time with a $200,000 grant from Anderson. One of the earliest actions of Anderson's Friends of the Earth was an assault on the German nuclear industry, through such antinuclear actions as the anti-Brockdorf demonstrations in 1976, led by Friends of the Earth leader Holger Strohm. The director of Friends of the Earth in France, Brice Lalonde, was the Paris partner of the Rockefeller family law firm Coudert Brothers, and became Mitterrand's environment minister in 1989. It was Friends of the Earth which was used to block a major Japanese-Australian uranium supply agreement. In November 1974, Japanese Prime Minister Tanaka went to Canberra to meet Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam. The two made a commitment, potentially worth billions of dollars, for Australia to supply Japan's needs for future uranium ore and enter a joint project to develop uranium enrichment technology. British uranium mining giant Rio Tinto Zinc secretly deployed Friends of the Earth in Australia to mobilize opposition to the pending Japanese agreement, resulting some months later in the fall of Whitlam's government. Friends of the Earth had 'friends' in very high places in London and Washington.

But Robert 0. Anderson's major vehicle for spreading the new 'limits to growth' ideology among American and European establishment circles was his Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies. With Anderson as chairman and Atlantic Richfield head Thornton Bradshaw as vice-chairman, the Aspen Institute in the early 1970s was a major financial conduit for the creation of the establishment's new antinuclear agenda.

... Robert 0. Anderson brought in Joseph Slater from McGeorge Bundy's Ford Foundation to serve as Aspen's president. It was indeed a close-knit family in the Anglo-American establishment of the early 1970s. The initial project Slater launched at Aspen was the preparation of an international organizational offensive against industrial growth and especially nuclear energy, using the auspices (and the money) of the United Nations. Slater secured support of Sweden's UN ambassador, Sverker Aastrom, who, in the face of strenuous objections from developing countries, steered a proposal through the United Nations for an international conference on the environment.

From the outset, the June 1972 Stockholm UN Conference on the Environment was run by operatives of Anderson's Aspen Institute.

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The 1972 Stockholm conference created the necessary international organizational and publicity infrastructure, so that by the time of the Kissinger oil shock of 1973-74, a massive antinuclear propaganda offensive could be launched, with the added assistance of millions of dollars readily available from the oil-linked channels of the Atlantic Richfield Company, the Rockefeller Brothers' Fund and other such elite Anglo-American establishment circles. Among the groups which were funded by these people at the time were organizations including the ultra-elitist World Wildlife Fund, then chaired by the Bilderberg's Prince Bernhard and later by Royal Dutch Shell's John Loudon.

Indicative of the financial establishment's overwhelming influence in the American and British media is the fact that during this period no public outcry was heard about the probable conflict of interest involved in Robert 0. Anderson's well-financed antinuclear offensive, and the fact that his Atlantic Richfield Oil Co. was one of the major beneficiaries from the 1974 price increase of oil. Anderson's ARCO had invested tens of millions of dollars in high-risk oil infrastructure in Alaska's Prudhoe Bay and Britain's North Sea, together with Exxon, British Petroleum, Shell and the other Seven Sisters.

Had the 1974 oil crisis not raised the market price of oil to $11.65 per barrel or thereabouts, Anderson's investments in the North Sea and Alaska, as well as those of British Petroleum, Exxon and the others, would have brought financial ruin. To ensure a friendly press voice in Britain, Anderson at this time purchased the London Observer. Virtually no one asked if Anderson and his influential friends might have known in advance that Kissinger would create the conditions for a 400 per cent oil price rise.

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One of the most targeted countries for this new Anglo-American antinuclear offensive was Germany. While France's nuclear program was equally if not more ambitious, Germany was deemed an area where Anglo-American intelligence assets had greater likelihood of success, given their history in the postwar occupation of the Federal Republic. Almost as soon as the ink had dried on the Schmidt government's 1975 nuclear development program, an offensive was launched.

A key operative in this new project was a young woman with a German mother and an American stepfather, who had lived in the United States until 1970, working for U.S. Senator Hubert Humphrey, among other things. Petra K. Kelly had developed close ties in her U.S. years with one of the principal new Anglo-American antinuclear organizations created by McGeorge Bundy's Ford Foundation, the Natural Resources Defense Council. The Natural Resources Defense Council included Barbara Ward (Lady Jackson) and Laurance Rockefeller among its board members at the time. In Germany, Kelly began organizing legal assaults against the construction of the German nuclear program during the mid 1970s, resulting in costly delays and eventual large cuts in the entire German nuclear plan.

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0n April 24, 1974, in the midst of the oil crisis, the White House national security adviser, Henry Alfred Kissinger, issued National Security Council Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200), on the subject of 'Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests.' It was directed to all cabinet secretaries, the military Joint Chiefs of Staff as well as the CIA and other key agencies. On October 16, 1975, on Kissinger's urging, President Gerald Ford issued a memorandum confirming the need for 'U.S. leadership in world population matters,' based on the contents of the classified NSSM 200 document. The document made Malthusianism, for the first time in American history, an explicit item of security policy of the government of the United States. More bitterly ironic was the fact that it was initiated by a German-born Jew. Even during the Nazi years, government officials in Germany were more guarded about officially espousing such goals.

NSSM 200 argued that population expansion in select developing countries which also contain key strategic resources necessary to the U.S. economy posed potential U.S. 'national security threats.' The study warned that, under pressure from expanding domestic populations, countries with essential raw materials will tend to demand higher prices and better terms of trade for their exports to the United States. In this context, NSSM 200 identified a target list of 13 countries singled out as 'strategic targets' for U.S. efforts at population control. The list, which was drawn up in 1974, is instructive. No doubt, as with other major decisions of Kissinger, the selection of countries was made after close consultation with the British Foreign Office.

Kissinger explicitly stated in the memorandum, 'how much more efficient expenditures for population control might be than [would be funds for] raising production through direct investments in additional irrigation and power projects and factories.' British nineteenth-century imperialism could have expressed it no better. By the mid-1970s, the government of the United States, with this secret policy declaration, had committed itself to an agenda which would contribute to its own economic demise, as well as bringing untold famine, misery and unnecessary death throughout the developing sector. The 13 target countries named by Kissinger's study were Brazil, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Egypt, Nigeria, Mexico, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Turkey, Ethiopia and Colombia.

A Century of War

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