Bring Back The Old Hands To Keep The World In Safe Hands
The WASP hedge against a Kusherite, Likud foreign policy...
Next night Getty attended a banquet for sixty guests given by King Saud, who had succeeded to the throne on the death of his father, Ibn Saud, the previous year. Getty was seated second from the king, with the Turkish ambassador in between them, and bravely struggled to converse with the king in Arabic.
The king brusquely dismissed Getty’s attempt at polite conversation and demanded: “Wain zait, wain fluss?’ (‘Where is the oil, where is the money?’)
Getty replied at length, saying he had high expectations of oil being produced in the Neutral Zone in large quantities and that money would soon be pouring into the Saudi exchequer. He quoted projected figures and explained in detail how he thought the concession might be best exploited to their mutual advantage.
The king smiled at last and said: “You know, of course, what your President Roosevelt said to my father?”
Getty nodded and quoted F.D.R.’s widely-reported comment: “I am essentially a businessman and as a businessman I am interested in Saudi Arabia.”
The king looked at Getty and said: “You are a businessman.” Getty took it as a high compliment. (The House of Getty, p. 665-666)
You want my Middle East foreign policy? Bring back the WASP businessmen—and fast. Only the Anglo-American aristocracies know how to treat the Arabians squarely, fairly, and justly.
Careful readers of this Substack will know that I don’t exactly have the conventional view of Kim Philby, the alleged British traitor who defected to the Soviet Union.
Far from being a traitor, I suspect Philby acted as a go between betwixt the United Kingdom, the monarchy and the Kremlin and I go on at some length as to why the evidence supports my position. Indeed in the ancient world it was fairly common to have the children of elites in your country as a means of guaranteeing peace — sort of well kept-hostages.
If I’m right it suggests that there could well be people in our society who are effectively reputational martyrs for the peace between nations, who bravely accept the ignominy of history for the permanence of a changed state of affairs, who take on the role of scapegoat willingly.
This is why I am loathe to dismiss Jeffrey Epstein as some sort of monster, notwithstanding the considerable efforts to dismiss him entirely from the conversation as a kind of Voldemort.
How do I know that Epstein was useful to the U.S. and British governments? Well there’s no great Epstein book nearly four years after his death. Why not? Wouldn’t you preorder it? In fact there’s no effort to even write a serious, comprehensive book. Why?
Nor is there much inquiry into his tech investments. Like, are we really not supposed to talk about his early shares and weird trades around LinkedIn right before it was acquired by Microsoft? Or how he was an early investor in 23&Me?
Epstein’s mere association with Leon Black, the most powerful private equity magnate who paid Epstein $158 million for “tax advice,” ended Black’s career. Microsoft’s Bill Gates lost his marriage and much of his power in the aftermath of his Epstein ties. There’s a very active lawsuit against J.P. Morgan Chase simply because Epstein banked there.
I think the Epstein story, though, is quite powerful, and U.S. intelligence will use it to clean up compromised banks and institutions.
Having been targeted by a foreign government and its allies within your government when you are in the service of your government is a dastardly thing indeed. I see Epstein as a traveling Jew who belonged, ultimately, to no one but himself. He was a kind of Hugh Hefner meets Henry Kissinger. (The darker aspects of this identity have all been allegations and regrettably he hasn’t been given a trial for obvious reasons.)
The area I’m most interested in is his relationship with the Arabs and the Middle East. Epstein purportedly had a fake passport from Saudi Arabia.
Epstein worked for Towers Financial Corporation, one of the money laundering mechanisms for Saudi businessman and arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi.
Without Jeffrey Epstein’s financial flexibility at work Iran could never have purchased the weapons it needed in exchange for freeing the American hostages. That might be a stretch but if you’re going to hold HSBC responsible for laundering money for the drug cartels you also have to give credit for laundering for the good guys.
Now we know it didn’t quite work as it should have and Epstein, born in 1953, was, in fact, quite young during Iraq contra. But who knows how it might have worked out had Jimmy Carter not been sabotaged with a delay in the release of the hostages thus guaranteeing Ronald Regan’s election? Reagan’s efforts to stop Carter’s October Surprise are now well known, thanks to some New York Times piece.
The curious figure who you never hear mention of is Doug Leese who died in 2011. He’s reportedly the British intelligence who introduced the guys running Towers Financial Group’s Ponzi scheme and Epstein.
But what if Leese had just done it himself? What if the WASPs just went direct? They once did — by “going native”— and building those key relationships themselves rather than through proxies.
Less well known to spy circles was Kim Philby’s father, Harry St. John Bridger Philby (1885–1960), who became an advisor to Ibn Saud. Philby was many things.
In the tumult created by World War I in Arabia and in the Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia (the Germans and the Turks were allied against the British Empire), the British government saw in Ibn Saud the possibility of an alliance, if only because his vast desert domain might possess oil.
In December 1915, therefore, a British agent signed with him a pledge that he would not, now and forever, be “antagonistic to the British Government in any war,” and that he would “refrain from entering into any correspondence, agreement, or treaty, with any Foreign Nation or Power, and further to give immediate notice to the Political Authorities of the British Government of any other power to interfere in”Ibn Saud’s domain. By this parchment Ibn Saud was bound to recognize Britain’s interest in whatever treasure lay under the deserts. In return, Ibn Saud received a pension from the British government for arms and £5,000 gold yearly.
Then, in December 1917, a British political agent, Harry St. John Bridger Philby, landed on the Gulf coast of Ibn Saud’s dominion. Born in British Ceylon, the son of a tea planter, Philby was a member of a leading family of soldiers and civil servants in the British Empire. He had been an administrator in the Punjabi and Kashmir provinces of British India. There he had shown himself to be a unique individual of a type spawned by the special culture of the nineteenth-century British Empire — young, fit, ambitious, a scholar and linguist in Asian and European languages, personable, and well known as a good man in a tight spot. (Anthony Cave Brown, Oil, God, and Gold: The Story of Aramco and the Saudi Kings).
Rather hilariously Philby was also Ford car salesman who sold cars at a discount to the King who took them on hunting expeditions.
He even converted to Islam. How sincere was that conversion? Not very. But Philby knew that converting gave Ibn Saud cover within Saudi society and that he could be useful to the king in dealing with the privy council.
Did he really leave the service of Great Britain? Well, consider that Ibn Saud’s unification of Saudi Arabia was a strategic objective of the British Empire you might say that Philby was “our man in Riyadh.” He, who once declared that the existence of God was “intellectually incredible,” became a Muslim.
A well-traveled friend of mine once said that to properly know a country you have to bed a few of their women, eat their delicacies, and betray at least a few of their top men. Instead our State Department personnel are shuttled from embassy to embassy without developing real mastery of an area. They are like truckers who pass over America and know her only by her rest stops.
To really know a place you have to know the people who really run a place.
****
It’s time for the old bloodlines to return to the great game.
I am a descendant of the men who built America. My family is married into the Delano family.
“Build Back Better” indeed.