Charlotte Dennett in the Huffington Post:
My father, the late Daniel C. Dennett, worked under diplomatic cover as U.S. cultural attaché in Lebanon for the Office of Strategic Services and later the Central Intelligence Group. He had been recruited because of his Harvard education in European History and Islam and his invaluable post-graduate education during the 1930s teaching English to Arabs at the American University of Beirut. In 1943, just prior to his departure for Beirut, he issued a warning to an audience of academics: “God help us if we ever send troops to the Middle East.” And yet, once immersed in his espionage work, he found himself having to play the Great Game for Oil. That same year, 1943, he wrote an “Analysis of Work” (which I later released to The Village Voice) where he wrote — thanks to the inattention of some CIA-redactor who missed this line — that the oil of Saudi Arabia was so important that it “must be controlled at all costs.” And when he said “all costs” he wasn't kidding. He had been trained to anticipate a post-war “free for all” among America's former WW II allies in their quest for Arab oil. His involvement in trying to secure the greatest oil reserves in the Middle East for the U.S. — the oil of Saudi Arabia — would cost him his life, as well as the lives of tens of millions of Arabs and Jews. But that is another story.
I never knew my father. He died under mysterious circumstances following a top secret mission to Saudi Arabia in 1947, when I was six weeks old. But I've done a lot of digging, and I invite you to go to the Voice article where you will find a World War II era government map that I obtained from the national archives in Maryland that says this: “World War II is largely a war by and for oil.”
More here.
