Dr. Kissinger’s Yom Kippur oil shock

The Bilderberg annual meetings were initiated, in the utmost secrecy, in May 1954 by an Anglophile group which included George Ball, David Rockefeller, Dr. Joseph Retinger, Holland’s Prince Bernhard and George C. McGhee (then of the U.S. State Department and later a senior executive of Mobil Oil). Named for the place of their fi rst gathering, the Hotel de Bilderberg near Arnheim, the annual Bilderberg meetings gathered top elites of Europe and America for secret deliberations and policy discussion. Consensus was then ‘shaped’ in subsequent press comments and media coverage, but never with reference to the secret Bilderberg talks themselves. This Bilderberg process has been one of the most effective vehicles of postwar Anglo-American policy shaping.

What the powerful men grouped around Bilderberg had evidently decided that May was to launch a colossal assault against industrial growth in the world, in order to tilt the balance of power back to the advantage of Anglo-American fi nancial interests and the dollar. In order to do this, they determined to use their most prized weapon— control of the world’s oil fl ows. 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 fi nancial 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.

DR. KISSINGER’S YOM KIPPUR OIL SHOCK

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 offi cials confi rming the buildup for war, were fi rmly 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 Saltsjöbaden 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 AngloAmerican interests responsible stood quietly in the background.3

In mid October 1973, the German government of Chancellor Willy Brandt told the U.S. ambassador to Bonn that Germany was neutral in the Middle East confl ict, and would not permit the United States to resupply Israel from German military bases. With an ominous foreshadowing of similar exchanges which would occur some 17 years later, Nixon, on October 30, 1973, sent Chancellor Brandt a sharply worded protest note, most probably drafted by Kissinger:

We recognize that the Europeans are more dependent upon Arab oil than we, but we disagree that your vulnerability is decreased by disassociating yourselves from us on a matter of this importance … You note that this crisis was not a case of common responsibility for the Alliance, and that military supplies for Israel were for purposes which are not part of Alliance responsibility. I do not believe we can draw such a fi ne line …4

Washington would not permit Germany to declare its neutrality in the Middle East confl ict. But, signifi cantly, Britain was allowed to clearly state its neutrality, thus avoiding the impact of the Arab oil embargo. Once again, London had skillfully maneuvered itself around an international crisis that it had been instrumental in precipitating. One enormous consequence of the ensuing 400 per cent 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 profi t. It is a curious fact of the time that the profi tability of these new North Sea oilfi elds was not at all secure

until after the OPEC price rises. Of course, this might only have been a fortuitous coincidence.

By October 16, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, following a meeting on oil prices in Vienna, had raised their price by a staggering 70 per cent, from $3.01 to $5.11 per barrel. That same day, the members of the Arab OPEC countries, citing the U.S. support for Israel in the Middle East war, declared an embargo on all oil sales to the United States and the Netherlands—Rotterdam being the major oil port of western Europe.

Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Libya, Abu Dhabi, Qatar and Algeria announced on October 17, 1973, that they would cut their production below the September level by 5 per cent for October and an additional 5 per cent per month, ‘until Israeli withdrawal is completed from the whole Arab territories occupied in June 1967 and the legal rights of the Palestinian people are restored.’ The world’s fi rst ‘oil shock,’ or as the Japanese termed it, ‘Oil Shokku’ was underway.

Signifi cantly, 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.

When the Nixon White House sent a senior offi cial to the U.S. Treasury in 1974 in order to devise a strategy to force OPEC into lowering the oil price, he was bluntly turned away. In a memo, the offi cial stated, ‘It was the banking leaders who swept aside this advice and pressed for a “recycling” program to accommodate to higher oil prices. This was the fatal decision …’

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, fi nalized 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 fi nancing the U.S. government defi cits. A young Wall Street investment banker with the leading London-based Eurobond fi rm 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.5

Kissinger, as Nixon’s all-powerful national security adviser already fi rmly in control of all U.S. intelligence estimates, secured control of