Oil From Mosul

Oil flowed officially last week out of the Mosul province of Irak, out of a 35-year welter of some of the world's most intricate connivance and double-cross.

It was 1900 when a Briton discovered oil in Mosul (whence the word muslin), not far from the legendary site of the Garden of Eden, in the shadow of Mesopotamia's Kurdish Hills. Then the slippery Sultans of Turkey ruled, as Arab provinces, what is now Irak. The European oil companies were so greedy to get the Sultan's oil that they checkmated one another's efforts until June 1914. The line-up then was Britain, The Netherlands and Germany. Months later the War started, eventually eliminating Buyer Germany and Seller Turkey. After the War the double-crossing was resumed in earnest.

The Arabs under Feisal had helped the Allies on the promise of an independent Arab kingdom. Instead, the Allies gave Feisal Syria under a French mandate. When Feisal took his kingship seriously, the French kicked him out. Chastened, he was given the British mandate of Irak. Complained he: "European statesmen are like impressionist paintings. The effect at a distance is excellent."

Meanwhile no one had forgotten the oil. France had taken Germany's place. The U. S. had cut itself in on the pure-hearted principle of the "open door." Perhaps the Turkish concession was good but the companies wanted a new one from Irak's King Feisal. At last Irak Petroleum Co. was formed and the shares were equally divided, 23% each, among the winners: The Netherlands' Royal Dutch-Shell; Anglo-Persian, in which the British Government has a 50% interest; France's Compagnie Franc,aise des Petroles, in which the French Government has big holdings; and the U. S.'s Near East Development Corp., owned by New York's and New Jersey's Standard Companies and Gulf Refining Co. A final non-voting 5% went to a mysterious Armenian named C. S. Gulbenkian who was active in securing the Irak concession.

Everything was apparently set but in 1931 the world's oil markets were flooded by the eruption of the East Texas oil fields. The British, U. S. and Dutch oil men wanted to keep their Irak oil off the market as long as possible. The French, however, with no oil of their own, wanted their Irak oil at once. King Feisal, too, wanted his oil royalties, the chief prop of his State's income. Soon afterward Britain ended its mandate over Irak and gave Feisal his kingdom free and clear, with full membership in the League of Nations. Feisal began to develop plans to use his oil royalties to irrigate Irak and change it from a pocked desert land to its oldtime Garden of Eden state.

In 1927 Feisal forced the reluctant foreigners to drill. They promptly brought in the gigantic Baba Gurgur gusher near the spot where flicker the "Eternal Fires," supposed to have been King Nebuchadnezzar's "fiery furnace" (Daniel III). The oil flowed into the desert 600 miles from anywhere. Feisal demanded a pipe line. It was 1932 before the concessionaires began the heroic job of throwing 1,185 miles of pipe across lava beds, extinct volcanoes, sand desert and the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, to the Mediterranean shore. It need have been only some 600 miles except that the French demanded their own spur westward across their own mandate of Syria to the port of Tripoli. The other spur was to pass southwestward out of Irak, through the British mandate of Trans-jordania to the port of Haifa in the British mandate of Palestine. The French were in a hurry but they lacked the experienced men to build a long-distance petroleum pipe line. They were obliged to import U. S. engineers who had cut their teeth on the great U. S. pipe line systems. On this, the world's longest petroleum pipe line built as a single construction job,* the U. S. and British building crews turned in one of the slickest, most efficient jobs of pipe laying ever seen. They had to build camps, dig water wells, run water lines, telephone and telegraph lines. Huge 18-wheel trucks carried the 12-in. pipe in 40-ft. lengths over some of the world's worst terrain. An automatic ditch-digging caterpillar tractor scraped out the 3-foot trench; compressor drills took care of the rock; Texan welders joined the "firing lines" of six or eight lengths; Sudanese painted and poured boiling asphalt over the section, wrapped it in brown paper and lowered it into the trench; and another tractor shoveled the dirt back. Two crews worked inland from the ports of Tripoli and Haifa, the third out from Kirkuk. The French finished their spur first, last August, the British theirs in October. But not until last week was it time for the official oil ceremonies at Kirkuk.

King Ghazi I, dreamy-eyed son of the late Feisal, was there, figuring on using his oil royalties on his father's irrigation schemes. Smooth-faced, brisk Sir John Cadman, chairman of Irak Petroleum Co. Ltd. as well as of Anglo-Persian, British Ambassador Sir Francis Humphrys, and that rock-ribbed Tory, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs James Richard Stanhope, seventh Earl of a famed line, represented British interests. Paul Bastid, an international-minded French deputy, represented France. A handful of U. S. oilmen who had done most of the work solemnly watched young Ghazi turn a handle and start a stream of petroleum flowing toward the Mediterranean. Estimated flow per year: 4,000,000 tons. A dozen pump stations caught up last week's flow of oil and hastened it on toward the world's flooded oil markets. Back in Kirkuk Ghazi I was making a speech to the effect that he and his Arabs had enjoyed watching and helping the Westerners, had profited by the example.

*Much longer are many U. S. pipe line systems which include branches added over a period of years: Consolidated Oil Corp.'s 5,983 mi. line; Stanolind's 4,658; Texas Pipe Line's 3,870. Total mileage of U. S. interstate trunk pipe lines: about 51,000 mi.

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