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EXCERPT FROM THE LAST OIL SHOCK
The answerphone message is a lively elderly woman’s voice telling me she and her husband are out looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and if they find it, and if I leave a message, they will share. I laugh out loud; it seems somebody may have taken this literally. It’s her husband I’m after, Louis Christian, a retired oil company geologist who lives in Dallas, and a map maker with long experience in the Middle East. In the spring of 1998 the United States Geological Survey called to ask him to produce something on Iraq. His new maps would not tell the Marine Corps how to get to Baghdad, but may have everything to do with the reason they went. These were geological, subsurface structural maps, showing the thickness and types of rock at various depths, and essential for trying to calculate how much oil might be present. Louis drew them by hand, using information trawled from obscure technical papers in a dozen different languages, and charged a decent whack. That’s his business. Over the next 18 months he would deliver half a dozen. The USGS needed them to complete an assessment of Iraq’s potential oil resources. It was part of a wider assessment of the whole world they were conducting at the time, to be published in 2000. Just routine, apparently. Which makes it all the more interesting when you find out who paid for it…
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