The Oil - Steve LeVine

'The Oil' a slick account of the world of geopolitics

By Elizabeth Souder

DALLAS MORNING NEWS

Article Launched: 12/23/2007 02:59:16 AM PST

In 1994, Chevron Corp.'s then-chairman Ken Derr found himself caught between Russia and a wealthy womanizer.

The company had managed to negotiate rights to drill for oil in Kazakhstan, outmaneuvering rivals (including British Petroleum) for the chance to explore the vast Tengiz field on the Caspian Sea soon after the Soviet Union collapsed.

But Chevron failed to gain the rights to build a pipeline to bring the crude to market, leaving the key contract to Dutch oil trader John Deuss. Deuss had represented Russia in the drilling talks.

Deuss is one of many colorful characters that populate Steve LeVine's "The Oil and the Glory." Soon after the Soviet Union collapsed, the oil trader made it his business to negotiate deals in the resulting political chaos, sometimes on board his yacht with an entourage of women. And he saved a slice of each deal for himself.

LeVine describes dozens of characters: oil executives scouting for new fields, leaders of former states eager to pull their countries out of poverty -- or at least line their own pockets -- and the middlemen who brought them together. The KGB constantly buzz around negotiations.

Al Gore, Alfred Nobel, the Taliban and even Jay Leno's wife make appearances.

The central character is the oil beneath the Caspian Sea. LeVine, who lives in Dallas, uses oil to tell the story of how some former Soviet states gained their financial independence from Russia. The book is a fascinating back-door history of the Soviet political collapse and the U.S. response.

U.S. officials are drawn to the region out of fears that Chevron's pipeline through Russia will create an "iron umbilical cord" between Russia and its former states. Russia might not produce the Caspian oil, but the country would have its hand on the faucet. A rival pipeline would carry oil west through Georgia and Turkey to the Mediterranean.

The deals are complex, the players many. The book is dense with details, and readers will need to pay attention to each line if they want to stay with the story.

But LeVine balances the grind of the negotiations with fascinating characters -- mentally unbalanced former Soviet leaders, clever American dealmakers -- and with tales of real-life espionage. Every hotel room is bugged. A friendly dog has a transmitter on its collar.

In LeVine's book, multibillion-dollar deals turn on minor events, throw-away comments, inexplicable mood shifts.

As the world faces $100-a-barrel oil, the media often use the word "geopolitics" to explain the high price. LeVine unravels this mysterious term, in all its juicy, deadly, even absurd detail.

NONFICTION

TITLE: "The Oil and the Glory: The Pursuit of Empire and Fortune on the Caspian Sea"

AUTHOR: Steve LeVine

PUBLISHER: Random House

PRICE: $27.95; PAGES: 496

About The Oil and the Glory

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Pipeline politics became a modern day version of the 19th Century's Great Game, in which Britain and Russia had employed cunning and bluff to gain supremacy over the lands of the Caucasus and Central Asia. This is the story of how, at the dawn of the 21st century, the game was played once more across the harsh environs of the Caspian Sea.

The Oil and the Glory tells the heretofore little-heralded story of the long, epic struggle for fortune, glory and power on the Caspian Sea.

It takes the reader behind closed doors to watch the players themselves act out their self-interest in negotiations in the region itself, in Moscow, Paris, London, Caribbean islands, the United States and elsewhere.

The conclusion is both spectacular and tragic, as huge oil is found and fortunes earned, the United States scores one of its sole significant foreign policy triumphs of the last decade, but at the same time two Caspian presidents find themselves as unindicted co-conspirators in U.S. corruption cases, and the region's biggest foreign dealmaker of them all is charged with bribery in New York.

At a time when Moscow has dramatically reappeared as a powerful international player, the book also answers the question: can Russia be trusted?

The Oil and the Glory - Prologue

WTPRN GLOBAL EXCLUSIVE: MICROCHIP IMPLANTS CAUSE FAST-GROWING, MALIGNANT TUMORS IN LAB ANIMALS

September 7, 2007
The Associated Press will issue a breaking story this weekend revealing that microchip implants have induced cancer in laboratory animals and dogs, says privacy expert and long-time VeriChip opponent Dr. Katherine Albrecht. As the AP will report, a series of research articles spanning more than a decade found that mice and rats injected with glass-encapsulated RFID transponders developed malignant, fast-growing, lethal cancers in up to 1% to 10% of cases. The tumors originated in the tissue surrounding the microchips and often grew to completely surround the devices, the researchers said. Full Story Radio Interview Here

Dr. Katherine Albrecht is the director of CASPIAN (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering), an organization she founded in 1999 to advocate free-market, consumer-based solutions to the problem of retail privacy invasion. She is also a talk show host of "Uncovering the Truth" every weekday from 10am-12noon EST on the We The People Radio Network.

Katherine is widely recognized as one of the world's leading experts on consumer privacy. She regularly speaks on the consumer privacy and civil liberties impacts of new technologies, with an emphasis on RFID and retail issues. She has testified on RFID technology before the Federal Trade Commission, state legislatures, the European Commission, and the Federal Reserve Bank, and she has given over a thousand television, radio and print interviews to news outlets all over the world. Her efforts have been featured on CNN, NPR, the CBS Evening News, Business Week, and the London Times, to name just a few.

Executive Technology Magazine has called Katherine "perhaps the country's single most vocal privacy advocate" and Wired magazine calls her the "Erin Brockovich" of RFID".

Learn more about her book and efforts to wake people up to the evils of human microchip implants!
www.spychips.org

For Mr. Silverman not to know about this research would be negligent. If he did know about these studies, he certainly had an incentive to keep them quiet," said Albrecht. "Had the FDA known about the cancer link, they might never have approved his company's product."

* * *

"RFID sort of lends itself to a surreptitious tracking model, simply because of the way the tech operates, silently and through radio waves. If people have an interest in surreptitious tracking, RFID is a natural candidate."

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
July 19, 2004

MEXICAN GOVERNMENT PROMOTES MYTH OF RFID SECURITY
Chip implants won't help crime wracked country, could make things worse

"Promoting implanted RFID devices as a security measure is downright 'loco,'" says Katherine Albrecht, Founder and Director of CASPIAN (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering). "Advertising you've got a chip in your arm that opens important doors is an invitation to kidnapping and mutilation." A MUST READ!!