The Oil and the Glory by Steve Levine

Author:Steve Levine
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781588366467
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-10-22T16:00:00+00:00

In their jubilation, BP executives invited Nazarbayev to visit their Alaska operations and see for himself how their company could safeguard a fragile ecology. The Kazakh president pleaded the press of business at home but sent a delegation led by his prime minister, Karamanov. Grynberg escorted the visitors around the United States on a Marathon corporate jet and looked after their every need. Karamanov was suffering from bad dentures, and Grynberg instantly arranged for a new set—at BP’s expense, of course. Dentists checked his teeth in New Orleans, took imprints in Houston, and fit them in Anchorage. BP wrote it all off to the cost of retooling the flagging company.

To Karamanov, a diminutive man with sparkling eyes, Americans seemed to have forgotten the Cold War. His delegation received a warm welcome wherever it went, in New York, Colorado, San Francisco, at Disneyland. He found himself pondering why Soviet development had fallen behind that of the United States. Stalin, he decided, should have visited America. “If he had seen it, maybe [things] would have developed slightly differently. It’s just that the two ideological enemies, the two systems, feared each other. There was hatred, but of course the main thing was the fear. We couldn’t open up.”

At the climax of his visit, on June 23, 1990, in Alaska, Karamanov signed a more formal version of the Almaty protocol. Three weeks earlier, Chevron had signed its Tengiz protocol with Gorbachev, putting it on a collison course with British Petroleum. But BP, which quickly learned of the Chevron signing, was not dissuaded. There was a sense that the ground was shifting beneath the feet of the Soviet rulers and that Gorbachev might not be able to maintain absolute control. Republics like Kazakhstan could be on the verge of becoming their own power centers. BP was betting on Nursultan Nazarbayev and his Kazakh government.

The first sign that something might be amiss for BP came three weeks later. Nazarbayev himself suddenly showed up in the United States, flown there at Chevron’s expense and escorted by its astute Kremlin-connected adviser, Jim Giffen. The New York Times, publishing a photograph of the Kazakh leader provided by Giffen, described Nazarbayev as “a one-man chamber of commerce…trying to convince Americans that his mineral-rich region would be a good place to do business.” Nervous British Petroleum executives wondered what it all meant.

Then the other shoe fell. In Moscow, geopolitical concerns had begun to drive events solidly in Chevron’s favor. The Soviet leadership was coalescing around the idea that a deal with Chevron, and no one else—certainly not a non-American company—was “a precondition for any improvement in relations [with] the United States.” Gorbachev also still believed fundamentally in Giffen’s consortium of blue-ribbon American companies and its potential for reenergizing the Soviet economy. On meeting Chevron’s chairman in September 1990, Gorbachev “paused, grabbed [Ken] Derr’s hand, and declared, ‘We expect a lot from you.’” The end came swiftly. BP’s Hamilton was summoned to Moscow. “We can’t stop you from doing this deal with the Kazakhs,” Deputy Oil Minister Nikitin said with his usual military bearing.

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