Brown, a well-known writer on intelligence topics, won access to a cache of documents collected by William E. Mulligan, a long-time employee of the Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO), that deal with the corporation's activities from its origins in 1934 until almost a half-century later. Brown made the most of his opportunity, basing his readable and highly readable account of an enormously reclusive company on these materials. He reveals anecdotes small (in the 1930s, ARAMCO could not bring to Arabia goods bearing an asterisk - this too much resembled the Star of David for the Saudis), medium (the extent to which Saudi workers turned violently against their ARAMCO employer in June 1967), and large (the extent to which King Ibn Sa'ud dickered with Hitler).
Much about the company's history is curious: when Ibn Sa'ud had the momentous document granting ARAMCO its concession in May 1933 read out loud, he fell asleep, only to wake up at the conclusion. The Texan roughnecks who actually worked the fields with their Arabian assistants developed a patois called "Aramco-Arabic" to communicate by (down was colorfully expressed as Fok! No God damn it!). Early on, houses for Americans were constructed with a special cupboard to hold the alcoholic still; later, they contained whole rooms for this purpose. When Ibn Sa'ud left his country to meet Roosevelt in 1945, he transported hostages from the Mutayr and Bani Khalid tribes to ensure good behavior of their brethren during his absence. Not having more direct ways to assess Ibn Sa'ud's health, American intelligence tried to pilfer the contents of his toilet.
The low point of this tale takes place during the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, when Aramco officials, under severe pressure from the Saudi authorities, became out-and-out spokesmen of the Arab cause against Israel, quite ready to sacrifice American interests (not to speak of the Jewish state) for the sake of their precious oil concession. The moral bankruptcy of ARAMCO's position lost it the good will of many Americans, without either winning a change in U.S. policy or a slowdown in the Saudi takeover of the company - an event which finally occurred in 1988. Brown's account, strong in the early decades, peters out embarrassingly to a close, barely covering such major events as the Iran-Iraq war.
