Here is the extraordinary tale of what the U.S. State Department once called "the most valuable commercial prize in the history of the planet," the vast oil reserves beneath the sands of the Arabian desert. Using Aramco files never before available to scholars or journalists, dozens of personal interviews, and U.S. and British government documents, Anthony Cave Brown recounts the unceasing diplomatic and corporate maneuvers aimed at obtaining this unimaginable wealth, an ongoing drama that involved such figures as the great warrior-king Ibn Saud, founder of the Saudi dynasty; H. St. John Philby, the British scholar-adventurer who was a chief advisor to the king; the American philanthropist Charles Crane; Winston Churchill; Franklin Delano Roosevelt; and assorted oil-industry executives and engineers across the United States. Played out against a background of war and the turmoil of an ancient culture thrust abruptly into the twentieth century, the struggle to obtain the prize was won by the United States, which emerged from the battle to become the dominant Western power in the Middle East.

Anthony Cave Brown, the author of several well-received books on the history of espionage, here turns his attention to a story as full of intrigue as any spy novel: the rise of Aramco, once the world's leading oil concern. Led by a consortium of American investors, Aramco managed through considerable guile to insert itself in territory tightly controlled by the British--thanks, in part, to the labors of one H. St. John Philby, a British spy (and father of the notorious Soviet double agent Kim Philby) who held great influence in the court of Saudi king Ibn Saud, and who, writes Brown, "was to betray the British government in favor of Standard Oil." The Americans won Saudi favor not only through Philby, but also through an intrepid Chicago-born entrepreneur and diplomat named Charles Crane, who did for Ibn Saud what the British failed to do: Crane built a costly waterworks that brought drinking water into the Saudi interior. (For his part, Philby obtained the monopoly on selling Ford automobiles in the country. In six years, he sold the king 1,450 cars.) The result was a concession to the American concern to what the U.S. State Department once called "the most valuable commercial prize in the history of the planet," namely, the vast oil fields of Arabia; for an initial investment of £100,000, Aramco eventually extracted more than a trillion dollars from the Arabian reserves. The American interest in Saudi and Persian Gulf oil has remained strong ever since, Brown writes--he even calls the Gulf War of 1991 "the Aramco War"-- although the company was nationalized in the mid-1980s. Brown's careful research and vivid prose yield a fine read for anyone interested in contemporary affairs and world history. --Gregory McNamee