CHAPTER ONE Tracking TAPLINE the afternoon of March 24, 1947, ateam of American investiga- O tors combed through the wreckage of a C-47 military transport plane that had crashed into the side of a mountain near remote Dessie, Ethiopia, killing all six Americans aboard.' Four of the men on. Flight 3804's manifest had been enlisted men. The other two were civilians the Cairo-based US petroleum attaché and the Beirut-based US cultural artaché—my father, Daniel Dennett, who used his State Department posi- tion as a cover for his work for the Central Intelligence Group (CIG), pre- decessor to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Dennett had just come from a mission to American oil installations in Saudi Arabia. There, he had been trying to determine the final route of the Trans-Arabian Pipeline, which would transport oil across the Arabian Peninsula to a terminal point on the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean, in either Palestine or Lebanon. ‘The plane was carrying heavy cargo — 2,000 pounds of top secret radio ‘equipment as well as an aerial camera. The passengers were destined for ‘Addis Ababa and mectings with officials of Sinclair Oil. This American oil company had recently won an exclusive concession from Emperor Haile Selassie to explore for oil throughout all of Ethiopia. Investigators found the communications equipment smashed into many pieces, a eause for great concern back in Washington, DC. But lying in the rubble untouched by the impact of the crash was a book, titled simply This Fascinating Oil Busines. The author, Max Ball, was an oilman who had written the book in 1939, when anticipation of America becoming a major oil power in the Middle East was heightened thanks to its 1933 exclusive oil concession in Saudi Arabia, His goal, Ball explained, was to “uproot some cherished no- tions” about the oil business, plainly stating, among other things, that “the oil industry sno monopoly but adog-eat-dog competition, with too many dogs.”2 | The Crash of Flight 3804 It would take me many years to fully appreciate just how ugly — indeed, deadly — that dog-eat-dog competition could get, and how oil pipelines and espionage have played a major role in the many conflicts in the Middle East. Over the course of five decades I made annual trips to the US Na- tional Archives in College Park, Maryland, to pore over Daniel Dennett's declassified reports for the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and its immediate postwar successor, the CIG, trying to understand the events leading up to the plane crash and the nature of his work as American's top master spy in the Middle East. Perhaps because I never knew my father — I was six weeks old when he died—I felt compelled to “discover” him through his writings. But what propelled me more than anything was the _growing suspicion that the plane erash had not been an accident caused by ‘bad weather, as was tentatively reported in an accident report found atthe archives. “The plane crashed into the side of the mountain because clouds obscured the mountains,” my mother would explain. I never questioned her further, not wanting to upset her. It was only after her death in 1972, when I was in my early twenties and working as a roving correspondent throughout the Middle East, that I realized that I needed to know more about my father and the circumstances leading up to the plane crash, Decades later, in 1995, I tracked down a CIA officer at Fort Myer, just outside Washington, DC, who had served in the Middle East after the war and knew of my father. Dennett's death was “a great loss” he admitted. “He knew more about the Middle East than our man in Egypt.” whose knowl edge, he joked, “went back two thousand years.” Then he turned serious. “We always thought it was sabotage, but we could never prove it” A Life-Changing Discovery My introduction to pipeline politics actually began in late 1975, after I left Lebanon, then ravaged by civil war, and my job asa reporter for the Daily Star, an English-language newspaper in Beirut, to return to the States, [had been shot at during the buildup tothe civil war, and I decided that was natkeen on losing my life ata young age in a war that made no sense. joined my brother, also named Daniel Dennett, and his family for Christmas dinner at their home in North Andover, Massachusetts. After regaling them with tales of my ‘travels throughout the Middle East, I was suddenly struck by the realization that [had been retracing many of the steps of our late father when he was sleuthing in the Middle Eastin the mid-1940s under the code name “Carat”*‘Tracking TAPLINE | 3 ‘My Christmas-dinner epiphany prompted me to venture up into the attic to search for an old steamer trunk I had found in my mother's attic asa youngster. Back then, it had beckoned me to open it, but as I dimly recalled, Ihad been distracted by my grandmother's exotic costumes from her days as a biology teacher at a Christian college for girls in Constanti- nople (now Istanbul) in 1900. They had been draped over the trunk, and so paid litte attention to what lay inside. After my mother’s death, the steamer trunk was transferred to my brother's atti, where I happily found ieunder a sunlit eave. This time, with an anticipation I couldn't have begun to match in childhood, I opened it and found —to my astonishment —a blanket wrapped around a scrapbook crammed full of photographs of Turkey atthe turn of the century. Beneath it lay three more scrapbooks. One traced my father's youth through public high school, then Harvard and, upon graduation, teaching assignments at the American University of Beirut in the early 1930s; the other two ‘were full of photos and letters from my father and mother in Beirut to my grandparents in Winchester, Massachusetts, dating from 1944 to 1947, I immediately pulled out the last scrapbook and carefully tured one brittle page after another, looking for letters and newspaper clippings thatled “up to the time ofhis death, Sure enough, there was the fateful telegram to my mother informing her ofthe plane crash in Ethiopia. After that camea frayed yellow obituary from the Winchester Star, which stated that my father had bbeen om a “vacation junket” to Ethiopia. Better yet, inserted into the pages of the scrapbook were two folded documents, one identified in my mother's +handwriting as “Dan’s last report” and the other, “Dan’ last letter home.” For a few minutes I sat very still, realizing that these were the final reports from my father about his last days on earth. I was too excited to contemplate the fact that my mother had never told me of their existence, or that she and her mother-in-law had prepared these scrapbooks for someone in the family to eventually discover as a treasure trove of my father's life and death —in short, his legacy. Pasted into the scrapbook were letters of condolence from his professors and his peers. His German professor at Harvard, John Waltz, wrote, “In ‘my nearly 50 years of experience with college students, few have made such a strong and lasting impression upon me as your son... He seemed to me to represent the best New England traditions: open mindedness, fairness, tolerance, [and] humaneness and did not depart from them in the most4 | The Crash of Flight 3804 taying times. He had wise intellectual and artistic interests. He was the type of man that is most needed in America at the present time and in the immediate future.” It helped to read those words, to learn from someone other than family members that there had been good qualities to the man, at least when he was a student. But I couldn’t help wondering: Had he been tolerant and humane as a spy? After all, my attic discovery occurred at a time when all sorts of sordid revelations were being reported about the CIA in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Did they apply to the CLA’s predecessor organizations as well? Did they apply to my father? [found a telegram from the director ofthe Office of Near Eastern and Afri- can Affairs at the Department of State, Loy Henderson, stating that Dennett's “record of service was outstanding” That kind of tribute could perhaps be expected — although [ater learned that Henderson was a very big fish in the State Department and, in a break with protocol, often received many of Den- nett’ secret reports directly, without review by intermediaries, arare practice. Perhaps most interesting was a letter from the American minister to Saudi Arabia, J. Rives Childs, reporting to the American minister" in Beirut, Lowell Pinkerton, that “Dennett arrived {in Riyadh] about March 14 from Dhahran and was of great help to us in the information he was able to give me concerning the pipeline negotiations. He had an exceptional mind and indicated by his eagerness to learn and willingness to impart his knowledge that he possessed exceptional qualifications as an Officer of Our Government” (emphasis added) Reading through my father’s last letter and his last report, I concluded that his mission to Saudi Arabia was fraught with political intrigue, He was charged with inspecting American oil installations at the headquarters of the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco) in Dhahran and determin ing where the Trans-Arabian Pipeline (also known as TAPLINE) should cross the Arabian Peninsula, what countries it would traverse, and where it should terminate on the Eastern Mediterranean coast. His official report to Minister Childs described a top TAPLINE negotia- tor expressing deep frustration — not with the Saudis, but with the Syrians over their reluctance to grant pipeline transit rights over Syrian territory on the terms offered by the American oilmen. TAPLINE’s William Lenahan * During and immediately after World War I, ambastadors to the Midle East were re ferved to38 “ministers” and the embassies were called "legations‘Tracking TAPLINE | 5 “was in a gloomy and angry mood,” Dennett wrote. “He was finished with the Syrians. ... Shortly after we reached Dhahran he told me that he had been criticized by Aramco and Standard officials for talking too freely about the pipeline project [to me]. He asked me under no circumstances to reveal while I was in Dhahran that I knew anything about oF was in- terested in the pipeline negotiations. [ agreed” (Being a loyal government employee, however, Dennett ignored Lenahan's warning and, as noted by Childs, gave a detailed report on his vist to Saudi Arabia.)* My father’s last letter to my mother was more intimate and colorful, ‘expressing his awe and fascination with this new American enterprise and the walled-off, suburban-like community it had created in the middle of the desert, sitting on top of one of the richest oil finds in the world. He mused over the future of Arabia and noted, “The most interesting thing of all was seeing the plans now under foot for building new Arab towns, laying on electricity, drinking water, medical and hospital services, good sanitation... . No one knows just how large the biggest [oil] field is, but they have drilled 27 wells so far over an area 15 miles long and 8 wide and they haven't drilled a dry well yet.” His letter ended eryptically. He was not heading back to Beirut as origi nally planned. “For reasons will tell you late.” he reported to my mother, “Lam going to Ethiopia, From the contents of his last report and last letter home, I concluded that, in contradiction of his obituary, his subsequent flight to Ethiopia was no “va cation junket” Did government official tell my grandparents what to leave in and what to leave out of the obituary? Or did they sef-censor because they knew (or did they?) that he was on a top secret intelligence mission? Was this ‘why there was no mention of his trip to Saudi Arabia? I couldn't ask my grand- parents, who were long gone, or my mother. Where could I go for answers? There was no World Wide Web at this time. But of course there were libraries. Thankfully, the Howe Memorial Library of the University of Vermont was located in nearby Burlington. I went straight to its reference department on the first floor, which housed thick multivolume indexes to the New York Times. I pulled out the 1947 volume and began to search for articles on the Middle East and Saudi Arabia. What turned up was truly eye opening, ‘An article in the Sunday Times, dated March 2, 1947, appeared three weeks before the airplane erash under this headline: “Pipeline for U.S.JORDAN N SAUDI ARABIA * ‘A New Pipeline for the Middle East ‘This map is adapted from an extraordinary map published in the New York Times just eo weeks before the 1947 plane crash that killed Daniel Dennett. That ‘original map provided my firs introduction to pipeline politics. Like this one, i€ showed a projected route of the Trans-Arabian Pipeline, but its accompanyingSS Prereines Kay te Concessions (ZA americen Brien Joint interest: British, American, Frenen ane Daten article, "Pipeline for U.S. Adds to Mile East Issues,” put the pipeline and Den- nets last mission co Saudi Arabia into a larger context: a big-power rivalry over oil, especially wih Russia, that has continued to ths day. The map also showed the two branches ofthe older Irag Petroleum Company (IPC) pipelines, constructed in the early 1930s, which had equally profound significance to Middle Eas issues.*