Follow the Pipelines

‘Charlotte Dennett has written an excellent book summarizing the geopolitics of the Middle East historically through to current events. . . . This is an amazing piece of historical writing. . . . Students, foreign affairs “experts” and officials should have this work as required reading.’—Jim Miles, Palestine Chronicle

Part personal pilgrimage, part deft critique, Dennett’s insightful reportage examines what happens to international relations when oil wealth hangs in the balance, and she shines a glaring light on what so many have actually been dying for.

In 1947, Daniel Dennett, America’s sole master spy in the Middle East, was dispatched to Saudi Arabia to study the route of the proposed Trans-Arabian Pipeline. It would be his last assignment. A plane carrying him to Ethiopia went down, killing everyone onboard. Today, Dennett is recognised by the CIA as a ‘Fallen Star’ and an important figure in US intelligence history. Yet the true cause of his death remains clouded in secrecy.

In Follow the Pipelines, investigative journalist Charlotte Dennett digs into her father’s postwar counterintelligence work, which pitted him against America’s wartime allies – the British, French and Russians – in a covert battle for geopolitical and economic influence in the Middle East. Through stories and maps, she reveals how feverish competition among superpower intelligence networks, military and Big Oil interests have fueled indiscriminate attacks, misguided foreign policy and targeted killings that continue to this day.

 Follow the Pipelines also brings new questions to the fore:

• To what lengths has the United States negotiated with the Taliban, Al Qaeda and ISIS to secure Big Oil’s holdings in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen?
• Was the Pentagon’s goal of defeating ISIS a fraudulent pretext for America’s occupation of Syrian eastern provinces and a land grab for oil?
• Did the infamous double agent Kim Philby, who worked for the British while secretly spying for the Russians, have anything to do with Dennett’s death?
• Why have the US and China made North Africa the next major battleground in the Great Game for Oil?

Charlotte Dennett delivers an irrefutable indictment of these devastating external forces and demonstrates how decades of brutal violence have shaped the Middle East and birthed an era of endless conflict – all for oil.