66
A Century of War
oil leases for the Russian Baku, anticipating the imminent collapse of an economically isolated and badly damaged Soviet regime. This was the period of the notorious Lockhart Plot, in which Britain’s Moscow envoy, Sir Robin Bruce Lockhart, together with Sidney Reilly, were tried in absentia and sentenced to death for the August 1918 attempt on Lenin’s life. It was also the period of British and allied military landings at Archangel. British policy, under Churchill’s Colonial Office, had been to back an exile government around the dubious figure of Boris Savinkoff, former minister of war under the ill-fated Kerensky regime, and at the time a morphine addict. With the backing of Churchill and the British government, Deterding had channeled large sums of money to a White Russian counterrevolution under the leadership of Generals Wrangel and Denikine, Admiral Kolchak and others, as late as 1920. Deterding had formed the Anglo-Causasian Company in anticipation of his taking the prize of Baku oil. At one point, an increasingly frustrated Deterding even funneled monies to create a Baku separatist movement which was to have honored Deterding’s oil concessions.1 Four years of such covert and overt efforts at overthrowing the new Bolshevik regime had failed to yield results. By 1922, British had shifted their tactics, intending to intersect what London saw as a more pragmatic, though actually desperate, economic policy coming from Lenin’s Moscow, through the 1921 New Economic Program. SINCLAIR AND THE AMERICAN BID Determined as Deterding and the British were in 1922 to secure monopoly rights to develop and control the vast Russian oilfields, powerful American oil interests, including the Rockefeller Standard group, were equally determined. But by 1922, it appeared that conditions were ideal for the new British approach to Russia. Britain’s chief apparent rival for Soviet oil concessions, the American Sinclair Petroleum Company of Harry Sinclair, was implicated in a conveniently timed scandal which had erupted in the United States over oil leases on the Wyoming Teapot Dome Naval Reserve. Harry Sinclair, who portrayed himself as an Oklahoma oil ‘independent,’ in reality was a convenient ‘middle man’ for the Standard oil and banking interests to secure markets where a direct Standard bid might arouse suspicion—above all from Britain’s powerful rival Shell group. In the early 1920s, Sinclair was not the ‘maverick’ self-made man he appeared. On the board of directors
Engdahl 01 chap01 66
24/8/04 8:18:01 am
