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The pain and suffering experienced by these truth-tellers is seldom acknowledged. They may have sacrificed career opportunities, building a family, buying a home, all for writing out of a sense of duty to the public’s right to know, often suffering financially and at great personal cost to their loved ones. What makes their ordeal all the more excruciating is that they often come to believe that their books’ “failure” is their own failure, not knowing that their publisher secretly deep-sixed the book before it had a chance to compete in the “free marketplace of ideas.”

There is a word for this book suppression practice. It is called privishing, which means “to privately publish a book so it “sinks without a trace.” It happens when the publisher deliberately shortens the book’s life span by cutting its advertising budget, the author’s book tour, and the book’s print run.

My husband, Gerard Colby, and I discovered privishing while investigating what happened to his 586- page exposé, DuPont: Behind the Nylon Curtain. The New York Times Book review hailed it on page one as “something of a miracle … sculpture hewn out of the side of a mountain.” This and other great reviews did not sit well with the family that had come to be known as the Merchants of Death: the du Ponts of Delaware.

The DuPont book, originally published by Prentice-Hall in 1974, is a unique, unauthorized history of the DuPont Company, the duPont family, and America itself. It quickly took off in Delaware, (famously described by Ralph Nader as the “Company State,”) with long lines of purchasers waiting outside bookstores to get a copy. The Wilmington Delaware Inquirer reported that “bookstores couldn’t keep the book in stock after the Wilmington Morning News carried a front page story about a telephone call criticizing the “most unflattering book about the chemical giant.” And then, suddenly, the book died.

Now, some 5 decades later, Colby recently was honored at the14^th Annual Whistleblower Summit and Film Festival at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. for his decades-long efforts at exposing privishing and trying to protect authors from this perfidious practice that can be ruinous to their careers.. Seeing Jerry tell his story to an audience of whistleblowers and writers at the National Press Club was a wonderful moment in our 50 years together as investigative journalists. Never have I seen him happier for getting some well-deserved recognition for his book and the years of litigation that followed against his publisher and the subject matter of his book, Du Pont Company.

Andrew Kreig presents the Pillar Award to Jerry Colby. Photo by Jerry Ashton, who won the Pillar Award in 2025 for exposing the predatory practices of the debt collection industry.

Better still, the person to present the award was perfectly suited for the job. Andrew Kreig, who is a long-time member of the Whistleblower Summit host committee and an author, journalist, lawyer and director of the Justice Integrity Project, revealed, while presenting Jerry with a Pillar [of civil society ] Award, that his own mother, Margaret Kreig, had long wondered what had happened to her book, Black Market Medicine, published by Prentice-Hall in 1967. Ditto for Fletcher Prouty after Prentice-Hall likely privished his 1973 book, The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World. The only difference, Kreig acknowledged to this writer, was that they didn’t know about privishing, which happens in secrecy at the highest levels.

Book Rescue Missions: A Brief Preface to Colby’s Remarks

I should add that Lyle Stuart rescued Jerry’s book, and in 1984, published an updated version, DuPont Dynasty: Behind the Nylon Curtain, having urged him to write his heart out about what happened to the earlier edition -- only to privish it later! As Jerry revealed in the lead essay of Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press (2002, Prometheus Press, editor, Kristina Borjesson) “the only information Stuart’s company would provide later was that they had learned that their print jobber allegedly received 80% of its business from Prentice Hall.”

Finally, Mark Crispin Miller, retired NYU professor of media studies rescued DuPont Dynasty from oblivion. Along with 26 other books, it circulates freely within “The Forbidden Bookshelf,” published by OpenRoadMedia.

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This phenomenal series was created by Miller to bring vanished works back to life. An important segment on The Forbidden Bookshelf will appear in a feature-length documentary Reading the World. The Life and Times of Mark Crispin Miller, directed by his wife, Amy Smiley, and will prominently feature DuPont Dynasty and Thy Will Be Done. DuPont Dynasty is still earning e-book royalties; the hardcover edition is now a collector’s item currently selling on Amazon at $360.00.[Who benefits, I wonder?] Our joint project, Thy Will be Done. The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil, privished by Harper Collins in 1996, also survived as an ebook in the Forbidden Bookshelf series

In presenting the Pillar Award, Kreig pointed out that Colby had been the president of the National Writers Union to help protect other writers, including through years of litigation to prove “how and why a publisher can kill an author’s book without the author and sometimes even the editor knowing about because it is done at the highest levels.”

As a quick and notable aside, Kreig said the Justice Integrity Project “looks into theses types of things,” as it was founded by experienced journalists, and one of them was John Kelly, a producer for CBS and NBC for years, but he also worked with the CIA for four years.

“I was talking about Prentice Hall,” Kreig said, “and John Kelly pointed out ‘there’s someone there from the agency.’” Kreig googled it and saw that William Casey, future director of the CIA, had a bit job as a part-time editor of business books – “what a perfect place to keep an eye out for books they don’t like.”^[1] Whereupon he turned the mike over to Jerry.

Highlights of Colby’s Address on Receiving the Pillar Award

As he scanned the audience while proudly holding his plaque commemorating him as a “Person of Conscience,” Jerry began by stating how honored he felt “looking at you as brothers and sisters in the struggle for the rights of authors, the rights of journalists, and the rights of the people to know what is going on.. We can’t have a democracy without this.” He reminded his audience of the words of colonial writer and publisher John Peter Zengler, who wrote in 1735, “The Price of Liberty is Eternal Vigilance.”

He proceeded to tell his story of how he got involved in writing about the DuPont Co. and family.

He was working as a press secretary for Congressman John Dow of the 17^th Congressional District of New York. “I noticed John was fighting hard against his Republican opponent, the former commander of the American Legion, and that a lot of donations into his opponent’s campaign were from Delaware.

“I discovered the name duPont and began to investigate. They were the original founders of the gunpowder trust. They came from France, and were students of Antoine Lavoisier, who founded the gunpowder mills for King Louis XVI. They were the last people in France to protect the king with swords drawn. Then they fled from France. They landed on American shores and broke into a house while the occupants were at church and stole their food. Accounts differ as to whether they left a gold coin before moving on to Delaware to found the gunpowder mills along the Brandywine River.”^[2]

From gunpowder in the 19^th century they moved in the 20^th century into heading General Motors, manufacturing autos, paints, and weapons, and then focusing on chemicals, producing rayon, nylon, and artificial rubber. They are most known today for discharging from their facilities PFOA, the toxic “forever chemical”[which never breaks down in the environment] used in Teflon, contaminating the drinking water of an estimated 200 million Americans.

The Du Ponts, he learned during his research, were the major figures in fighting the famous sit-down strike by UAW workers in 1937 at their General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan.

“So I went into the Eleutherian- Mills Hagley Foundation Library, the DuPont Library located above the old Brandywine gunpowder mills in Wilmington. I uncovered correspondence between Governor Frank Murphy of Michigan and the Du Ponts. They were asking Gov. Murphy to pull out the National Guard and set up machine guns to fight the strikers . Frank Murphy refused, thank God, due to FDR’s intercession, who declared that the UAW had the right to engage in collective bargaining.

“Suddenly the librarian pulled this document out of my hands. It turns out he was providing information about me to the du Ponts.”

Colby went back to finishing his book, which took him five years. He waited toward the end of writing to contact the company and family members for interviews. They declined, but behind the scenes, alarm bells began to go off. “Who is this guy?” queried. Irénée du Pont, Jr. the family patriarch.

DuPont Company launched an investigation. and got Prentice Hall to leak a copy of the manuscript to a du Pont- affiliated bookstore in Wilmington, Delaware.

Irénée duPont died in 2023 at age 103. Credit: Delaware Online

The Infamous Phone Call to Book of the Month Club

“And then one day I got a call from my editor Bram Cavin who took me out to lunch. He said there’s big trouble. Prentice Hall got a call from the Public Relations Department of DuPont Co. who said the book was ‘scurrilous and actionable’ --in other words, threatening a lawsuit. I said wonderful. Let’s call a press conference. Bram said Prentice Hall wouldn’t do that.”

“Next I learned that Book of the Month Club had been contacted by DuPont Company and dropped the book from its’ business-oriented Fortune Book Club in an unprecedented 24 hours. I thought, Boy, that’s another reason for a press conference! His audience chuckled, knowing that interference with a book is normally a writer’s dream to gain publicity. But his “Banned in Boston” dream was short-lived.

Instead, Prentice Hall began to privish the book, cutting its ad budget, the author’s tour and book run “so it couldn’t price profitably under any conceivable formula,” as he later discovered during his lawsuit in a memo from a Prentice-Hall official. He sued Prentice Hall for breach of contract and DuPont for inducing breach of contract. (Note: this was not a First Amendment case because the government was not doing the censoring).

“Thanks to my wife, Charlotte,” he continued, “she found an editor at Viking, William Decker, who was willing to testify in court about privishing.”

Colby and Dennett at Whistleblower Summit. Photo: Jerry Ashton

Decker admitted that privishing was well known in the industry but is not known to authors. His testimony was key to convincing federal judge Charles Brieant to find Prentice Hall liable for privishing the book. As for DuPont, the judge demurred. Jerry sensed problems when the family patriarch, Irénée duPont, Jr. took the stand, “and the judge stepped down from his dais and went over and turned on the light for him so he could read a document. I turned to my lawyer, Ron DePtris, and whispered, ‘We’re in big trouble, boy!’”

‘We finished the trial. It lasted two weeks. Not one bit of coverage by the media “

He later learned that after the trial ended, the Judge addressed the opposing attorneys in chambers.

Judge Brieant said he was not going to find the du Ponts, a “pillar of American society,^[3]” liable “for expressing its opinion of the book.” (This, despite the fact that DuPont had threatened a lawsuit against Prentice Hall. Wasn’t that inducing a breach of contract?) “But you, Prentice Hall, you will publish it, not privish it.”

Prentice Hall offered to settle for a paltry $24,000 “as long as I kept quiet about privishing.” Jerry refused, and appealed against both Prentice Hall and DuPont to the U.S. Court of Appeals in the Second Circuit. The Court sided with both DuPont and Prentice Hall in a lengthy opinion, most notably disagreeing with District Judge Brieant that “the contract in question obliges P-H “to use its best efforts to promote the book fully.’”

The ACLU appealed the case to the U.S Supreme Court, which denied cert.

Still, the case is viewed as something of a landmark in legal and publishing circles, highlighting how publishing contracts are interpreted regarding promotional efforts, requiring a balance between a publishers’ discretion with a duty to support authors’ works adequately.

Publishers may be loathe to put in their contracts a clause requiring their “best efforts to promote the book” but that doesn’t mean authors shouldn’t try to advocate for this wording.

Jerry ended his acceptance speech urging writers to familiarize themselves with privishing, reminding them again of John Peter Zengler’s warning: “The Price of Liberty is Eternal Vigilance.”

^[1] Jerry and I also discovered that Prentice-Hall’s editor in chief, John Kirk, had worked for two publishers with CIA ties: The Samuel Walker Publishing Company and the Free Europe Press (the publishing arm of the CIA-funded Radio Free Europe.]

^[2] When Irénée du Pont testified in trial, he never mentioned being upset over charges that the DuPonts were widely known as the Merchants of Death for their millions in profits from WWI, or that their chemical plants spewed carcinogens and polluted the rivers of West Virginia, where Irenee was once plant manager in the 1980s Instead, what troubled him was the perceived affront to the family’s proud history and the impact it would have on is children by suggesting that the newly- arrived immigrants failed to leave a gold coin after stealing the churchgoers’ food.

^[3] Oh, the irony! Who could have guessed that the perceived enemy of America’s “pillar of society,” would be awarded the Pillar Award at a Whistleblower Summit decades later. Hats off to Marcel Reid, co-founder and co-host of the Whistleblower Summit, for making this happen.

Which only underscores how dire the situation is, IF Lebanon is going to beef up its armed forces to oversee the intended disarmament of Hezbollah.

Trump is apparently trying to convince the Syrians to take on Hezbollah, suggesting “they would do a better job,” something neither the Syrian nor the Lebanese people want.

Now, the Latest Update

The Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed by the US and Iran on June 17^th, is now one week old and the subject of endless debate and much derision, even among Republicans, as Vice President J.D. Vance tries to spin the MOU as a success story.

As for President Trump’s reported desire to see a ceasefire in Lebanon, opening the Strait of Hormuz has taken precedence. Why? Because he is afraid of a new Depression, according to University of Chicago’s Tom Mersheimer in a conversation with the Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi. “He has even said there is a possibility of an economic catrastophe if the Strait isn’t opened.”

So Trump struck a deal with Iran, on terms highly favorable to Iran, Israel’s mortal enemy. This, in turn, has infuriated Netanyahu, who was not party to the MOU and has made it clear that Israeli forces are not budging from southern Lebanon--and in fact are pushing father north. This despite the fact that Lebanon is mentioned in the first paragraph of the MOU, with both the US and Iran committing to “the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon.”

How to reconcile the hardliner demands of Iran (Israeli troops must leave Lebanon if peace is to be preserved) versus the equally intransigent demands of Israel (Iran’s proxy forces, i.e. Hezbollah, must be eliminated from Lebanon)?

Given Iran’s current strategic advantage, i.e. its threat to close the Strait if Israel doesn’t withdraw from Lebanon, it would appear that the pressure is on Israel to respect the ceasefire with Lebanon, however shaky, that was arrived at in April (and described in my previous Substack, What’s Next for Lebanon: Ceasefire or Civil War).

According to the Times of Israel, Israeli and Lebanese officials have resumed meeting in the US State Department since the MOU was signed, with talks on June 23 centered around a partial Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon.

Meeting of Israeli and Lebanese negotiators at the US State Department on June 23. Photo: Israeli embassy

“Under a planned pilot program agreed to by Jerusalem and Beirut earlier this month,” the Times of Israel reported, “the IDF would leave certain areas of southern Lebanon and hand them over to the control of the Lebanese army.”

Israel’s ambassador to the US, Yechiel Leiter, confessed before the talks began, that “we are in a train wreck.”

Meanwhile, the facts on the ground in southern Lebanon are grim. As soon as the MOU was announced, families began returning to their homes in southern Lebanon, only to encounter more severe Israeli bombing raids.

First responders at the site of an Israeli air strike on the southern Lebanese village of Qennarit on June 20, 2026 [AFP]

According to Lylla Younes, a reporter based in Beirut, “the Israeli military later declared it had conducted more than 150 strikes across Lebanon, the majority concentrated in Nabatieh and its surrounding villages. At least 47 people were killed that night.” Many residents reported that these raids “bore resemblance to April 8, when the Israeli military struck more than 150 locations across Lebanon in the span of ten minutes after the United States and Iran first agreed to a temporary ceasefire—an attack that killed over 350 people and is referred to in Lebanon as “Black Wednesday.”

“Nothing is coming from these negotiations, “ a Lebanese mother told Younes on June 2^nd while trying to return to her home, “We go to sleep to death and wake up to death. They’ve destroyed everything. Tell me, what more do they want? What is left?”

Indeed, what more do they want?

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Credit: New York Times

Then this past weekend, the situation suddenly reversed in Trump’s favor. On Sunday, Trump declared a memorandum of understanding with Iran was imminent, and today, Monday, he declared that it had been signed electronically, with a formal signing set for next Friday. The text of the MOU has not been released. Even more interesting, Israel and Lebanon appear to have been sidelined, as Trump desperately sought some kind of ceasefire with Iran to free up the Strait of Hormuz. Clearly, midterm elections weighed on his calculations. Netanyahu, also facing elections, defied Trump again and bombed Beirut Sunday morning. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz grimly headlined their coverage: “Humiliated by Trump on the Iran front, Netanyahu may set the Middle East ablaze.” At this point, both leaders, fighting to stay out of jail, are putting their own interests first in a break from their storied bromance.

Analysts on the Sunday talk shows reacted to the MOU with a fair amount of skepticism, noting this was the 38^th time that Trump had announced he had a deal with Iran. I, for one, have to wonder who the Trump administration is dealing with in Iran, when Iran’s hardliner Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) has made it clear that nothing is going to happen unless Israel stopped attacking Hezbollah and withdrew from Lebanon. Which begs the following questions: Who is in control? Who can be believed? Or trusted? When would this dizzying merry-go-round of ceasefire followed by violence end with a true peace in the Middle East?

Or, at the very least, a ceasefire in Lebanon?

Trump’s efforts regarding Lebanon

.“Trump seems to have a deep interest in Lebanon to defend itself,” commented the Washington Post’s David Ignatius on MSNow on June 7. Ignatius was right.

I had the opportunity to listen and talk to leaders of the Lebanese American Renaissance Partnersip [LARP} at their 20^th anniversary convention in Washington on April 21^stat the very time Israeli and Lebanese negotiators were meeting in DC at Trump’s invitation. The LARP event brought together members of Congress, ambassadors, former assistant secretaries of State, and a couple hundred Lebanese Americans. Hope was in the air that a ceasefire could be achieved.

LARP Panel Session at the Rayburn House Office Building, April 21,2026

LARP had come into being in 2006 – the same year Israeli forces invaded Lebanon once again, and were blunted by an unexpectedly fierce resistance by Hezbollah. During the next two decades, LARP’s mission has been to “connect members of the vast Lebanese diaspora with their homeland, through strategic economic partnerships, policy advocacy, diplomatic and cultural exchanges.”

Nada Farhat, a member of LARP who has done extensive humanitarian work in Lebanon, told me ahead of time that Israel was regarded as the major problem for Lebanon, but that most Lebanese had had enough with violence that had wracked the country for decades.

Taking Stock:

The cost borne by this small country has been huge. As I detailed in Part I: Cry My Beloved Lebanon, some 100,000 Palestinians took refuge in Lebanon after the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinian from the newly formed state of Israel in 1948.

By the early 70s, Palestinian refugees in Lebanon had become politicized…and armed, bent on returning to their homeland. Cross border attacks between Palestinians and Israelis were common occurrences.

After nearly 3 decades of relative peace, Lebanon would endure 15 years of civil war (1975-1990) that succeeded in booting the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) out of Lebanon –at the cost of 150,000 Lebanese lives. Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 and managed to occupy southern Lebanon for 18 years, until 2000. Israel’s occupation provoked armed resistance by Shia Islamist militias and the creation of Hezbollah with assistance from Iran. Hezbollah’s kidnapping of two IDF soldiers prompted another cross border invasion by Israel in 2006, resulting in 1,181 Lebanese killed, an estimated 916,000 people displaced and “more than 15,000 homes destroyed, along with 900 commercial structures, including farms and factories.”

The Israel air force dropped two 500lb laser guided bombs on the southern city of Tyre –in 2006.

And let’s not forget the deadly explosion of Beirut’s port in 2020, resulting in 218 deaths, 7,000 injuries, and approximately 300,000 displaced people, alongside property damage estimated at US$15 billion. This major Beirut trauma has yet to be solved.

The explosion in Beirut’s port, 2020.

More violence erupted between Israel and Hezbollah in 2024 following the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7,2023 and Israel’s ongoing retaliation against Gaza. Hezbollah fired rockets into Israel in solidarity with the Gazans; Israel responded with fierce aerial bombardment of Lebanon from 2024 to the present, followed by yet another invasion in March, which has cost over 3000 Lebanese lives and the displacement of over a million from southern Lebanon.

Whither Lebanon Now?

When I arrived in Washington on April 21 to attend the LARP convention, my mind still swirled with images of whole villages being destroyed in southern Lebanon amid reports that the “Gazafication of Lebanon” was well underway.

A man raises the Lebanese flag as he walks through the rubble of the southern coastal city of Tyre in 2024. Israeli attacks on Tyre have continued. Photo credit:Reuters

How, I wondered, would this gathering of Lebanese Americans have any hope for peace?

Washington, on April 17^th, had announced that negotiations between Israel and Lebanon had produced a 10 day ceasefire, but Israeli shelling in southern Lebanon continued.

And yet, hope was the theme of the meeting. Trump had personally invited the Israeli and Lebanese negotiators to meet in the White House to further ceasefire discussions.

A general consensus emerged from the discussions that day. To wit:

Hezbollah would have to disarm – a demand by Israel if its bombing campaign in Lebanon was to stop. And the time was ripe for this to happen. Trump’s attacks against Iran had significantly weakened the Islamic Republic militarily, and Netanyahu’s military campaign against Hezbollah had also weakened Iran’s proxy force in Lebanon.

“We have a major opportunity for peace now,” said David Hale of the Middle East Institute. “I haven’t been so hopeful as I am now.”

Commented Joel Rayburn, a former army officer, diplomat and scholar who had served as special envoy to Syria from 2018 to 2021, Israel was no longer afraid of Hezbollah. Nor was Syria, which, under President Assad, had joined Iran in equipping Hezbollah during the 2006 war In Lebanon. With Assad out of the way and a new leader in Syria, this seemed the optimum time to try for a ceasefire and to implement a plan for peace.

Congressman Darin Lahood (R-Illinois) agreed. “Iran has never been weaker. Hezbollah has never been weaker. This is our opportunity to have a robust Lebanese army.”

Yet what would this entail? Would strengthening Lebanon’s army result in disarming Hezbollah? How, exactly, would this happen? Herein lay a dilemma.

Hezbollah parade in Lebanon on 12 November 1989 (AFP)

Hezbollah has significant popular support from Lebanese Shiites and has gained more support from a significant number of Sunnis alarmed by the genocide in Gaza. Shia militias armed by Iran, not the Lebanese army, consistently fought the Israeli invasions and occupation of southern Lebanon (primarily Shia territory) since 2006; Hezbollah’s assistance to poor Shia communities boosted its political posture and by 2009 it became a force to be reckoned within the Lebanese parliament. It remains so today, not only as a political party but as the dominant military force in Lebanon. It controls southern Lebanon, parts of Beirut and the eastern Bekaa valley. The valley’s terrain, consisting of remote farms, a network of villages and smaller valleys leading into the mountains, has been an ideal location for armed mobilization and secretive training of Hezbollah militants.

Hezbollah is widely considered the largest non-state actor in the Middle East

Brigadier General Oliver Hakemeh, Lebanon’s defense attaché in Washington, expressed his concerns at this meeting--and to me in a conversation later -- that there should be some sensitivity to the views of Lebanon’s Shiites, “90% of whom support Hezbollah.” He was not in favor of more violence, and hoped to find a way to win over the hearts and minds for all who lived in Lebanon. He wondered: Would members of Lebanon’s armed forces want to kill their fellow countrymen?

Nada Farhat questioned how the Lebanese army could be strengthened, when its members currently could barely make ends meet at $300 a month. Lebanon had been in an economic crisis since 2019. The question was: what would it take to fortify the Lebanese army financially?

A Daunting Risk Assessment

Other concerns popped up from the audience: The Lebanese army had not been able to effectively patrol its own territory. UN forces stationed in the south had been ineffective. One idea was to bring in an international force…perhaps composed of French and Germans. Another idea would be to bring in NGOs. But there would have to be a risk assessment ahead of time.

And let’s face it: given the level of violence in southern Lebanon, who would want to risk their lives?

Since April, up to 2000 Israel IDF forces have been injured in southern Lebanon. As of March, 2025, 50 had been killed. As of now, 100 medics have died in the fighting since Israel invaded in March, nine journalists, seven UNIFIL forces and three members of the Lebanese army, including a general.

The overall tenor of this 20^th anniversary meeting remained guardedly hopeful that negotiations between Israel and Lebanon in Washington DC would yield a durable ceasefire and a road map for peace. To be sure, Lebanon was facing big dilemmas and big opportunities. Its location, wedged between unfriendly neighbors --Israel in the south and Syria to the north – didn’t’ help. The verdict was still out on Syria’s new post-Assad president, Ahmed al-Sharaa. But on one issue, all agreed: Lebanon’s sovereignty had to be protected. And, now more than ever before, they shared a universal and understandable yearning: “We want our country back.”

As hoped, the U.S. announced a three week extension of the ceasefire on April 24th. Sadly, it didn’t last.

Since the April Ceasefire:

By May 7, Al Jazeera was reporting that “Israel’s attacks on Lebanon and pressure on the Lebanese government to disarm the pro-Iran Shia movement Hezbollah by force are stoking internal tensions.” According to Michael Young, a Lebanon expert at the Carnegie Middle East Center, “They know very well what they’re doing. When they were emptying the southern suburbs, they knew very well that most of these people would head into inner Beirut and into areas which are not areas of Shia majority. And certainly, I think this was their effort to create sectarian tensions and, in a way, put more pressure on the Lebanese state.”

This seemed to confirm what I had heard back in March, when I was shown a conversation between two Israeli TV reporters. “Seems like we’re leading the State of

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Lebanon toward civil war,” commented Raviv Drucker. “ Maybe it’s not so bad for us. Let the Lebanese government fight Hezbollah.” Responded veteran reporter Alon Ben David,”That’s been the goal from the start.”

On June 7, Fareed Zakaria on GPS concluded that Lebanese anger continued over Hezbollah “dragging the country into ongoing violence,” and yet, “the extent of Israel’s bombing has renewed sympathy for Hezbollah and created a feeling that Israel’s war is on the Shia community, not just Hezbollah.”

Why, for example, would Israel drop white phosphorous on Shia civilians and farm lands in southern Lebanon, causing severe burns to humans and destroying a once thriving agricultural industry?

White phosphorus fired by the IDF on the Israel-Lebanon border in November 2023. Photograph: Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

Final thoughts

At the very end of the LARP meeting, I raised a question that had not been addressed: what was the status of Lebanon’s offshore oil and gas reserves, part of the vast deposits along the eastern Mediterranean that had been discovered between 2000 and 2010 with an estimated worth of $500 billion?

The answer: nothing could be done until stability in the region could be assured. Indeed, no bank will finance a major development project if there is violence in the area. But how to eradicate violence, if not by dropping bombs, sending in troops, and destroying and depopulating whole villages in Gaza and Lebanon?

As I documented in my book, Follow the Pipelines, Netanyahu has long dreamed of developing an energy corridor along the eastern Mediterranean, tapping into its offshore resources. Now, with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, there is renewed interest in developing the IMEC energy corridor ‘linking the Arabian Peninsula to the Mediterranean via Haifa in Israel.” Such a route, reports India’s Outlook Business, “would provide a direct export pathway to Europe without passing through the Gulf.” But could it be protected from violence? Stay tuned.

.

He did not live to see the creation of the Jewish state of Israel in 1948, but like many foreign service officers at the time, he worried about the impact of sending European settlers to take over Arab lands in Palestine.

For all his foreboding, he could not have imagined the expulsion and flight of 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland in 1948, or that 100,000 would settle in refugee camps in Lebanon.

Palestinians flee their homes in Palestine. Now the “Gazafication” of Lebanon is underway

Or that in 2026, over one million people had been displaced from their homes in southern Lebanon and entire villages have been demolished.

Massive Exodus from southern Lebanon in 2024. Photo: AP

In 2024 and 2026, many terrified Lebanese have had to flee on foot. Source: NewIndiaExpress

Two lives entwined

In the spring of 1946, when I was conceived in a Bedouin cave in the Jordanian ruins of Petra — Carat managed a vacation trip with my Mother as cover for his investigating British post-war intentions in the region — Palestine was convulsed by violence. Jews were fighting the British, Arabs were fighting Jews, and within two months Zionist Irgun militants would bomb British headquarters at the King David Hotel in Palestine. killing 91 people — 41 Arabs, 28 Britons, and 17 Jews.

Several weeks later, both the British and American embassies were bombed in Beirut, the latter (including my father’s office) more heavily. My father spent several months investigating the bombing. He wondered why the British were not concerned. He reported that the bombings were not as sophisticated as happened at the King David Hotel and concluded Arab nationalists were the likely culprits.

My birthplace, 1947

My attachment to Lebanon spans decades, beginning with the first six weeks of my life.

Shortly after my birth, my father took me to the American embassy and showed me off to embassy staffers, exulting “It’s a girl” — to which, my widowed mother would later tell me, smiling gently, “no one said anything at all.”

Daniel Dennett at a State Deparment event in Beirut

In retrospect, this story must have stayed with me, imbuing in me a responsibility to prove his love for me right, while asserting my sense of value in a world governed largely by patriarchy. And yet, nearly three decades later, during the time I worked as a journalist in Lebanon and the Gulf countries (1972–75) I never experienced derision or disrespect. Quite the contrary. Maybe I was an object of curiosity (there were few female journalists in those days).

Or maybe there was something else…something my father revealed through his own writings: that in the 1930s and 40s, during his time there, Americans were held in high esteem in Lebanon and much of the Middle East. And the feeling was mutual.

What ultimately connected our lives was his likely death by sabotage on March 20, 1947 in a C-47 military plane en route to Ethiopia following his top secret mission to Saudi Arabia to determine the safest route of the Trans-Arabian pipeline.

The Crash of Flight 3804 that killed my father. Source: National Archives.

He couldn’t wait to get back to Lebanon to tell his wife about what he witnessed at ARAMCO’s growing oil compound in the Saudi desert, and to see his baby girl, but he never made it.

I was two months old when I left Lebanon on a boat headed back to the States with my Mother, Ruth Leck Dennett, my 5 year old brother Dan and 8 year old sister Cynthia.

The Dennett family in Beirut. Summer, 1946

My first passport photo. I was two months old when I left Lebanon for the US.

We grew up in my father’s hometown of Winchester, Mass, a suburb of Boston . When I turned 16, my mother, asked if I would like to go back to Beirut, which she dearly missed. And small wonder.

My parents’ Beirut in the 1930’s and 40s was a thriving cosmopolitan city known as the Paris of the Middle East. The French had taken over from the defeated Ottoman Turks following World War I, and during their 20 year reign under the League of Nations’-created “French mandate” imparted their unique flavor to an already charming orange-roofed city of merchants, bankers, university intellectuals, and spies from around the world. Beirut’s fine climate and unique location — astride the azure-blue Eastern Mediterranean Sea –ware perhaps its greatest gifts to foreigners, and eventually, Lebanon’s tragic undoing.

The campus of the American University of Beirut

When I arrived in Beirut with my mother in 1963 to attend my junior and senior year of high school at the American Conmunity School, I expected to find white-robed Arabs astride camels walking through its streets. Instead I found Beirutees dressed in Western clothes, shopping for American goods in the local Spinneys supermarket, and often frequenting lively night clubs where they drank whiskey and gin and danced to romantic French songs and American pop music.

They spoke Arabic but also French, and increasingly English, and were incredibly generous to foreigners, welcoming us into their homes saying Ahlan wa Sahlan (you are welcome) and sharing their fabulous food: humus, tabouli, babaganouche, shish-kebab, and kibbe being among my favorites.

I went on school trips to the ancient (and still lived-in) Phoenician port of Byblos just north of Beirut, to the Phoenician port of Tyre to the south, and, to the marvelous Roman ruins of Baalbek. UNESCO has declared Baalbek a national heritage site, describing it as “one of the most celebrated sanctuaries of the ancient world, progressively overlaid with colossal constructions which were built during more than two centuries. Its monumental ensemble is one of the most impressive testimonies of the Roman architecture of the imperial period.”

In modern times, Baalbek’s Roman Acropolis posed as the dramatic backdrop to the Baalbek International Festival, which featured dance, theater, opera, and jazz every summer. I had the thrill of watching rehearsals for the wonderful Lebanese debke dancers from my balcony in Beirut.

Never would I have dreamed that Baalbek and Tyre would be indiscriminately bombed by Israelis to “rout out Hezbollah” as is happening now.

My father fondly described Lebanon as a tiny country whose political life “is never dull and always highly flavored.” Famed for its cultural and religious diversity, it was the original homeland of the Phoenicians and was subsequently conquered and occupied by the Assyrians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Persians, the Arabs, the Crusaders, the Ottomans and the French. After gaining independence from France in 1943, life in Lebanon was relatively stable for the next 30 years, its government set up so the president was a Christian, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim, and the Speaker of the House, a Shiite Muslim.

Lebanon’s Civil war

In addition to the 100,000 Palestinians who became refugees in Lebanon in 1948, the Six Day war of 1967 created some 300,000 more refugees from lands taken over by Israel, many again escaping to Lebanon. With the growth of the Palestinian resistance movement in the 1960s and 70s, their presence in Lebanon was resented by conservative Christian Maronites, who allied themselves with Israel.

As fate would have it, I had returned to Lebanon in 1972 following college in the U.S. and graduate school in Florence Italy with an MA in art history. My mother died that year and, as it had with her in the early 60s, Lebanon beckoned to me to come back. I took up a career as a journalist writing about art and architecture, and before long, about politics in Lebanon and economic development in the Gulf countries of Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Oman and Iran.

By 1975, anti-Palestinian ferment was growing.

I recall standing on top of my Beirut apartment and watching French mirage jets flying overhead on their way to bomb a refugee camp in Beirut. A few weeks later, while traveling by a communal (“service”) taxi to visit a friend living near the airport, a tank came barreling down the road toward us, its turrets swinging wildly, causing my fellow occupants and me to flee the taxi. I took refuge in a Christian school and spent hours hiding under a desk, watching terrified parents dodging bullets to rescue their children.

As evening approached, a young man who had spotted me earlier came back and informed me that I had two choices: stay there, not knowing who would take over the school, or flee with him. I went with him. We raced to his car across the street when a shot rang out. It missed, and he was able to get me lowered into the back seat of his car. He sped in reverse and took us to safety at his uncle’s house. When his uncle saw me on the phone dictating my story to the Beirut Daily Star, he suspected a spy and asked me which side I was on. Knowing the neighborhood and prone to truth telling, I said “The Palestinians.”

“Then you are welcome,” said the uncle, who fed me and gave me a room where I would spend the night.

Though I didn’t know it at the time, this was the precursor to the Lebanese Civil war. I decided on April 1, 1975 (April Fools Day) to take a breather in England. Two weeks later, right wing Christian Phalangists fired on a busload of Palestinians in Lebanon, killing them all. I knew this was very serious, and so returned to the U.S. The civil war which began in April 1975 would pit (mostly Shiite) Muslims and Palestinians against Maronite Christians, lasting 15 years (1975–1990) and killing over 150,000.

In 1982, Israeli forces entered Lebanon, and succeeded in forcing Yasser Arafat and his Palestine Liberation Organization out of the country. Shortly afterwards, Israelis encouraged Christian Phalangists to attack the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut, slaughtering 3,000 Palestinians and Lebanese civilians over two days.

Palestinian women amid bodies in their refugee camp of Shatila. Photo: Gulf News Archives

Israel occupied southern Lebanon until the year 2000. The only forces to fight the Israelis were Shiite Islamists calling themselves Hezbollah. Inspired by the Iranian Revolution of 1979 that put Ayatollah Khomeini in power, they sought support from Iran and became part of the “Axis of Resistance.”

After offering the embattled Shiites extensive humanitarian aid, including schools and health clinics, Hezbollah (the party of God) formed a political party and became a sizable bloc in Lebanon’s parliament.

Fast forward to 2024–26. Israeli jets have pounded the city of Baalbek, damaging residential buildings and killing civilians, on the grounds that it hosts members of Hezbollah.

Destruction near the Roman temples of Baalbek. Photo: AFP

There is talk now that Israel wants to trigger another civil war, with the aim of forcing Hezbollah to disarm and abandon its Shiite followers as a condition for cessation of its bombing of southern and now central Lebanon.

Today, you may ask, as I did, why on earth is this happening?

The Gateway to Middle East Oil.

When I first set foot in Lebanon in 1963, I learned that the Lebanese people took pride in calling this small country astride the Mediterranean Sea the “Gateway to the Middle East.” It was an apt description for anyone who cared to look at a map and view Lebanon as a land bridge to oil-rich Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. I shared in that pride, and considered those two years in Lebanon a transformative experience.

Having returned in the 70s as a rather inquisitive young adult, I discerned that Western businessmen viewed Lebanon from a slightly different perspective, as the Gateway to Middle East Oil. For Lebanon hosted two Mediterranean terminal points for pipelines , one in the north carrying oil from Iraq (the French-controlled Iraq Petroleum Co, or IPC pipeline) and the other in the south carrying oil from Saudi Arabia (the U.S. controlled Trans-Arabian Pipeline, Tapllne). As I have described in my book, Follow the Pipelines, Tapline and the lucrative Saudi oil that flowed through it on the way to Europe transformed the U.S. into a major regional power replacing both the French and the British (who controlled Palestine) to become the world’s numero uno superpower.

My father understood the importance of Saudi oil the moment he set foot in Lebanon in early 1944. In a six page “Analysis of Work,” which I got declassified after suing the CIA under FOIA, he outlined what OSS headquarters expected of him.

“Up to the outbreak of the present war,” he wrote, “ the U.S. enjoyed, throughout the entire region, a greater prestige than any other foreign power.” His main points were as follows:

1. The Middle East, having been outside the sphere of our imperialistic activity, regards us as being politically neutral and therefore safe. This was an important consideration in the granting us of oil concessions in Arabia.”

2. American educational, medical and scientific missions [largely centered around the American University of Beirut] has brought us to the attention of all classes of society in a highly favorable manner. The philanthropic basis of our activity was generally accepted at its face value.”

I should note, other than marveling over his term “imperialistic,” that he had had the invaluable experience of teaching English to Middle Eastern students at the American University of Beirut (AUB) from 1931–33. As it was for me, so too for him: his time in Lebanon changed his life. He developed a love for the country’s diverse peoples, religions, and cultures, causing him to switch his major at Harvard from German literature and language to Middle Eastern history specializing in Islam.

AUB was founded by Chistian missionaries in the late 19th century . They named it the Syrian Protestant College, but it evolved into a secular institution valued for its pursuit of science, its liberal arts education and respect for all religions. It also boasted an extraordinary medical school that trained nurses and doctors while providing highly-rated health care. (I should know: I was born there!) AUB’s President David Dodge once aptly described the university as America’s most valuable investment in the Middle East, next to oil.

Yet because of these advantages, my father continued writing in his 1944 report “up to 1939, a deliberate effort was made by all great Powers, Axis and Allied, to undermine our prestige.” By 1944, the Germans no longer posed a significant threat, so Dennett’s focus was spying on our allies: the French, the British and the Soviets, all of whom were intensely jealous of the US’s exclusive oil concession with Saudi Arabia.

In a segment he called “Probable American post-war interests,” he cited “Oil as a vital factor,” and most significantly, the oil of Saudi Arabia. “The probable extent of these oil deposits is so great that we must control them at all costs.” [Emphasis added].

This one sentence would become a mantra for any nation hoping to become a major power in the latter half of the 20th century up until now. And the fact that my father was spying on our allies, as they were doing with him, got me to thinking about The Great Game for Oil and the deadly politics that often underly the Game, and that likely made my father one of its first American victims.

So there you have it: my explanation for the chaos in Lebanon, or at least part of it. The quest to find and control oil, the coveted fuel of all militaries, was behind all the wars in the Middle East. And the discovery between 2000 and 2010 of $500 billion worth of oil and natural gas off the coast of Gaza, Israel, and Lebanon is a major factor behind the violence engulfing the region. My goal has been to elevate discussions on the Middle East conflict above the typical Arab versus Jew descriptions. Yes, those conflicts are real and deeply routed in the massive traumas visited on both Jews and Arabs, but who has benefited from their suffering?

The fighting in Gaza and now Lebanon continues despite diplomatic efforts to achieve a lasting cease-fire.

Today, May 10th Israeli airstrikes in southern Lebanon continue, killilng (without warning) eight members of one family: a married couple, three of their children, a 6-month-old grandchild, the father’s brother and a grandmother. More evacuation orders have been issued.

“They are hitting a lot today,” the resident of a town just south Saksakiyeh told the New York Times. “So many people are getting killed for no reason.”

In Part II, I will take you into the hearts and minds of prominent Lebanese -American citizens who are desperately seeking an end to the fighting, and the return of Lebanon “as it used to be.”

You can find my previous posts on charlottedennettsubstack.com

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One month into the war in Iran, journalists and politicians, Democrats and Republicans, leftist, rightists, and independents should no longer be asking what this war is all about.

Sasan Fayazmanesh, in her March 13th piece in Counterpunch, made a convincing (and brave) argument that It’s Israel, Stupid. She just didn’t go far enough.

She rightly begins by posing the questions that seemed to have no coherent answer: “Is it because negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program were not progressing? Is it because Iran was close to developing nuclear weapons? Is it because Iranian ballistic missiles were going to reach the US soon? Is it because Israel was going to attack Iran and the US took pre-emptive measures to ensure the safety of Americans? Is it because the Iranian government was violating human rights? Or is it something else?”

She posits “The US attacked Iran for one reason and one reason only: Israel. Israel, “created by the US and Europeans, has been urging the US for decades to wage a destructive war against Iran.”

Why? To achieve the Zionist goal of achieving a Greater Israel. But she omits Israel’s thirst for getting and controlling oil, harkening back to the presidency of George W. Bush and a revelation made to former NATO commander Wesley Clark immediately after 911. As I documented in my book, Follow the Pipelines: Uncovering the Mystery of a Lost Spy and the Deadly Politics of the Great Game for Oil, Clark in 2007 stated that a Pentagon official revealed to him in 2001 a plan to “attack and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years,” starting with Iraq and moving on to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan [all oil -related conflicts] and Iran. While on a book tour, Clark stated further that the Bush strategy was shaped around gaining control of Middle East oil resources, based on a plan by his neoconservative backers [some with dual US-Israeli citizenship] to “use US troops to secure access to these energy supplies abroad.”

Today Iran is the third largest owner of oil reserves in the world, behind Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. This simple fact has not been adequately addressed by the media, which has focused on the dangers of blockading the Strait of Hormuz and seizing Kharg Island, resulting in the increase in the price of oil, and chronicling how both sides have bombed the others’ oil installations –without explaining the hidden context of competing petro powers seeking to command and control oil to adequately supply their militaries — and most recently, to use natural gas to power AI data centers.

Now, at last, Trump has let the cat out of the bag. Last week, amidst a throng of journalists assembled at a press conference following Trump’s meeting with his cabinet, one reporter rose his hand high and asked the forbidden question: “Do you want to control Iran’s oil?”

“That’s an option,” Trump replied. “But I wouldn’t talk about it.” For the next couple of days, he adhered to the traditional playbook of hiding any oil connection to US war plans, then spilled it out over the weekend, telling the Financial Times he could “take the oil in Iran” and seize the energy export hub of Kharg Island.

The fact is, aside from Israel’s territorial ambitions, oil has always been the cause of all the wars in the Middle East since the state of Israel was created in 1948.

Location, Location

There is even an oil connection to the famous Balfour Declaration of 1917 with the British supporting the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. It was actually a simple letter by Lord Balfour, Britain’s foreign secretary, to Walter de Rothchild of Europe’s huge oil and banking dynasty. This small but significant detail is often absent from historical accounts on the founding of Israel, whose location, bordering the Eastern Mediterranean, made it a perfect terminal point for a pipeline carrying oil from Iraq. Provided, that is, European Jews could be relied on to protect the pipeline.

Why don’t people know this? Because the oil connection to war has been rigorously suppressed by all the nations who are, or aspire to be, great powers. They learned a big lesson from Germany’s defeat in World War I and World War II: its military ran out of gas.

Oil was, and still is, the fuel of the military, which makes it the most coveted resource on earth. Even if Country A has enough of it (as Trump is now arguing about US reserves) it has to worry about Enemy Country B (Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, the BRICS alliance) getting other rich, untapped reserves. I call it The Great Game for Oil, and it’s getting more vicious than ever now that huge quantities of natural gas are being sought after to power AI data centers.

President Trump, no student of history, likely knows this fact because he talks to his oil donors frequently, assuring them he will make good on the millions they donated to his campaigns by going to war. He may try to disguise his true ambitions: beyond his moniker Drill Baby Drill, he strives to make billions while serving as Commander in Chief bent on conquering the oil lands of the world.

At least Senator Ed Marke of Massachusetts revealed on March 27 that the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz had made billions for oil companies, causing their stocks to skyrocket.On March 27, he sent a letter to the CEOs of at five of the largest oil and gas companies — ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Shell, and BP — demanding that “big oil and gas companies refrain from awarding executives profits generated from rising oil prices during Trump’s illegal war in Iran.”

But even he missed a central fact. What wife or mother would accept sending her loved ones into harm’s way if an underlying purpose was to enrich oil companies and their government allies? This, and the need to fuel the military, is where pretexts come into play.

Check out the different pretexts offered by the Bush administration prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 to rid Iraq of WMD’s

And here’s how Time Magazine, under the ownership of arch-conservative Henry Luce, demonized Iranian President Mohammed Mosadegh in 1952 before the CIA coup that overthrew him in 1953. His “crime” was nationalizing Iran’s oil.

The Iranian people have a long memory of this travesty, which brought the Shah onto the Peacock Throne. Who benefited from the coup? Nelson and David Rockefeller (see my previous substack on Iran)

WWI: When oil first reigned supreme

Winston Churchill, as First Lord of the British Admiralty, made the fateful decision in 1911 to change his navy’s fuel from coal (of which Britain had plenty) to faster, more efficient, and cheaper oil (of which she had none). Britain, Churchill said ruefully, had no choice but to fight “on a sea of troubles” to get the oil Britian needed, but didn’t have.

That’s why seizing the oil of Iraq became Britain’s “first class war aim” during World War I. Once achieved, the next challenge was moving the oil to where it was needed. The victors of World War I knew how to do it: by pipeline.

The best route? Piping it to a terminal point on the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean, where warships could fuel up and tankers could transport it to European ports. The perfect location: Haifa, Palestine. Israeli scholar Bernard Aishai, author of The Tragedy of Zionism, has noted that “Haifa was an ideal port — and the natural place for a pipeline terminal bringing oil from the east.” Haifa was inhabited by both Arabs and Jews, but eventually would become primarily Jewish controlled. What better way to ensure a pipeline’s safety than to colonize Palestine with European Jews who could be trusted to protect it against Muslim infidels?

Trust me on this: My father’s mission, as head of U.S. counter-intelligence for the OSS and later CIG (Central Intelligence Group, both precursors of the CIA) )in the Middle East during WWII, wrote in 1943 that his most important mission was “to control the oil at all costs.” That was Saudi Oil, America’s prize possession, that was also going to be piped to the Eastern Mediterranean — either to Israel or Lebanon — by the Trans-Arabian pipeline. As the New York Times wrote on May 2, 1947, two weeks before my father died in a mysterious plane crash, “protection of that investment and its military and economic security that it represents inevitably will become one of the prime objectives of American foreign policy in this area, which has already become a pivot point of world politics and one of the main focal points of rivalry between East and West” –East meaning Russia.

This game is still going on: Protection of oil at all costs. And at what cost in human lives and treasure?

Billions of dollars have poured into Israel over nearly eight decades to ensure the secure flow of oil — from Iraq and from Saudi Arabia — to the world. And although Netanyahu is now getting his way for his own expansionist schemes due to his close relationship with Trump, Trump will call the ultimate shots, because Big Oil trumps everything.

A few more nuggets from history

Traditional histories of the immediate post WWI period describe how France and England, the primary victors of their war to seize the oil of Turkey’s defeated Ottoman Empire, divided the rectangle of former Ottoman land stretching from Syria and Palestine through Mesopotamia (Iraq). Their 1920 agreement would come to be known as the San Remo Agreement. In those days, however, State Department documents more accurately termed it the San Remo Agreement on Oil. The reference would subsequently disappear from public discourse, as would 1920 references to U.S. foreign policy as “oleaginous diplomacy.”

Fast Forward to 1944. when Jewish survivors of the Holocaust managed to escape to Palestine. They were the first to hold aloft signs saying “No Blood for Oil,” protesting the Roosevelt Administration’s delay in rescuing Jews so as not to alienate King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia, who objected to the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine and threatened the US’s exclusive and very lucrative oil concession.

Five years later, in 1949, the CIA overthrew Syria’s nationalist leader Shukri Quwatly, who opposed the Trans-Arabian pipeline traversing Syrian territory and terminating in Israel, (The pipeline would terminate in southern Lebanon, some 100 miles north of Israel.)

The daughter of a CIA spy, Anne Tazewell, takes us into Egypt and the mid 1950s in her book, A Good Spy Leaves No Trace: Big OIL:CIA Secrets and a Spy Daughter’s Reckoning. She uncovers a document likely by her father, that states “Our policy in the Middle East has been directed toward retaining the area within the free world, developing the oil resources.”

To be fair, the CIA in 2003 put President George W. Bush on notice that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq did not pose an imminent threat requiring an invasion, which Bush (junior oilman that he was) ignored. Same thing happened with Trump: US intelligence warning him that Iran did not pose an imminent threat. Generals also warned Trump about Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz.

But now Trump is so locked-in, that he has now ordered over 10,000 American troups to the Middle East.

Yemen and the alternative to the Strait of Hormuz

Not addressed by media accounts is Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen against the Houthis with US backing. The Saudi plan: to build a Trans-Yemen pipeline that would avoid the Strait of Hormuz and carry Saudi oil down through southern Yemen terminating in the Gulf of Aden near the Arabian Sea.

Trump, in 2019, vetoed a Yemen War Powers Act that would have ended US military involvement aimed at subduing the Houthis in this devastating war that caused an acute humanitarian crisis, including mass starvation in Yemen. As of March, 2025, the Saudis have been “insisting that the land the pipeline crosses be considered Saudi territory — a demand that local tribes have rejected.”

At the time of writing, Trump is now threatening to “obliterate” Iranian electric installations and Kharg Island if Iran doesn’t open the Strait of Hormuz. And Israel is expanding its bombing of Southern Lebanon, killing UN peacekeepers and three journalists. More than 1,200 people have been killed, including 120 children, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry and UNICEF, while more than 1.2 million people have been forced out of their homes across the country.

And yes, there is an oil and gas connection to these incursions, as Netanyahu strives to establish an energy corridor along the entire eastern Mediterranean, tapping into $5 billion in oil and natural gas off the coast of Gaza, Israel, Lebanon and Syria. Stay tuned.

You can find my previous essays at CharlotteDennett.substack.com

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President Donald J. Trump is ignoring this widely-held sentiment — including among his MAGA supporters — and has just ordered 2500 troops to the Middle East. In so doing, he is risking the survival of millions of civilians throughout the region, our soldiers, and the planet itself.

His appalling ignorance about the region, its diverse and ancient history…

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On February 11th, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu met yet again with President Trump on his sixth visit since Trump resumed the presidency. It got me to wondering: why all these private meetings between the two leaders? What are they up to now?

This time the meeting was about Iran, trying to work out a nuclear deal while keeping Tehran from expanding its regional influence and proxy militias. But getting control of Iran’s oil could be quietly in the works, similar to what happened in Venezuela. Trump’s ordering the U.S.S. Gerald Ford — the largest and most sophisticated battleship carrying up to 75 aircraft — away from Venezuela towards Iran, cannot be lost on Iranians.

According to former-Pentagon, Middle East specialist Jasmine Gamal, “The fact that that carrier is there tells me that this isn’t just a routine kind of, ‘Hey, let’s flex some muscle.’ …This is not a dress rehearsal.” Trump has previously stated he wants regime change. So does Netanyahu. Consider that their neo-con supporters have been itching to get control of Iran for its oil ever since 2001, when a Pentagon official told retired NATO commander Wesley Clark that the Pentagon had plans to “attack and destroy the governments of seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq and moving on to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan —and Iran, the last holdout that has managed to remain intact, although seriously weakened. Today, with massive natural gas required to fuel AI data bases, seizing Iran’s huge oil deposits (in size, just behind those of Venezuela and Saudi Arabia) could be on the agenda, regardless of the cost in blood and treasure. Notes CNN, Iran “has a leg up on Venezuela, whose authoritarian regime allowed the country’s oil infrastructure to crumble over the past couple decades. By contrast, Iran’s infrastructure is in decent shape.”

The Art of Deception

In short, are Trump’s negotiators going throuogh the motions of diplomacty while preparing for military action? The previous meeting between Trump and Netanyahu on December 29^th was billed as discussions around a Gaza cease fire. I couldn’t help but note an online comment from a viewer of NBC coverage of the December meeting “This is scary....they’re setting up a scheme.”

The commenter may have been right. Gaza was on the official agenda, but performing regime change in Venezuela surely was too, but in secret. Four days later, on January 4^th, US special forces abducted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro from his home in a highly efficient operation that had many wondering if Israelis were involved. Venezuela’s vice president Delsi Rodriguez immediately observed “The governments of the world are shocked that the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela is the victim and target of an attack of this nature, which undoubtedly has Zionist undertones.” Maduro himself predicted a month earlier that “the far-right Zionists want to hand this country over to the devils.” Given Venezuela’s close relations with Iran, these devil-references would likely go over well in the land that sees the U.S. as the “Great Satan” and Israel, according to the Jerusalem Post, as “The Little Satan.”

At times, according to the Post, Israel actually secretly sided with Iran for geopolitical reasons. "During the eight year Iraq-Iran war ( 1980-1988), clandestine Israeli arms sales to Iran “helped turn the tide of the war and prevent Iran from falling to Saddam’s forces.”

For a Latin American equivalent to clandestine Israeli involvement in regime change during the 1980s, The Chris Hedges report on Guatemala entitled The Silent Holocaust is instructive. Hedges, along with human rights lawyer (and daughter of a Holocaust escapee) Jennifer Harbury, relay how Israel provided sophisticated military equipment and advice to Guatemalan military leaders to achieve regime change in 1982, resulting in the genocidal regime of General Rios Montt. . General Mont’s chief of staff openly referred to the the “Palestinization” of Guatemala’s indigenous Mayan tribes.

So here we are, as Trump sends another US battleship to within striking range of Iran, and orders more attacks on Venezuelan boats. To the disgust of many Vermonters, he has also sent F35 fighter planes commandeered by Vermont National Guardsmen to the Middle East.

Iran, in response to the U.S. military buildup, is conducting military exercises in the Strait of Hormuz, the critical oil shipping route in the Middle East where 20% of the world’s oil passes. On February 17th, following more negotiations in Geneva, Vice President JD Vance opined that the talks on nuclear issues showed some progress, “but Iran won’t acknowledge Trump’s red lines.” Iran, for its part, just launched missiles toward the Strait of Hormuz.

Iranian military exercise in the Strait of Hormuz. Getty images

It’s hard to say which scenario could be more “scary”: a US military invasion of Venezuela, or a US invasion of Iran. Regarding the former, I previously wrote that Trump lacked a historical understanding of Latin America and the strong memories that our neighbors to the south have of previous US interventions for regime change. U.S. boots on the ground—usually required for regime change —would be counter-productive, if not catastrophic.

Trump likely realized as much, and opted for regime-change-by- abduction instead. (In fact, it is more like a leadership change, as the Maduro regime remains intact)

As for Iran, the Iranian people, divided as they are about the theocratic regime of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, share the bitter memory of the CIA’s 1953 coup that overturned the nationalist regime of Mohammad Mossadegh and brought the Shah in to replace him. I would wager that the majority of Iranians have no love for the United States, especially after the U.S.’s “Operation Midnight Hammer” dropped bunker busters on Iran’s underground nuclear reactors during its seven day war last June and reportedly killed 1000 people. Albeit it, with one significant exception: well-off Iranians who thrived under the monarchial reign of Shah Reza Pahlavi are eager to support the Shah’s son in taking power if regime change occurs.

Ra Ra for the Shah’s son

This was confirmed by Israeli journalist Alex Traiman on February 20th writing on “the calculations behind Netanyahu’s emergency meeting with Trump” for the Jewish News Service .“Iranians seek a return toward the path of modernity, freedom and prosperity, akin to the period previously attributed to Shah Reza Pahlavi’s leadership prior to the Islamic Revolution of 1979 that ushered in Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.”

Akin to the Shah’s leadership? That’s a stretch, as I will reveal below.

On Friday, February 13^th Christian Amanpour shared her interview with the Shah’s son, Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, who admitted he was involved in encouraging the recent massive protests in Iran, resulting (Amanpour interjected) in a vicious crackdown by Khameni’s forces and many thousands being killed.

The Shah, his son and his wife before he was deposed. Source: The collector.com

Whatever happens, I feel impelled to remind leaders what life was like under the Shah.

During the mid 1970s –before the 1979 Iranian revolution that overthrew the Shah—I visited Iran. I was sent there by the publisher of the English language, Beirut-based magazine, The Middle East Sketch, to write up a special issue on Iran as it celebrated its 2500 year anniversary of the Persian empire as part of the Shah’s so-called bloodless White Revolution, using Iran’s formidable oil wealth to rapidly modernize Iran. It would be a turning point in my young journalistic career.

I knew my publisher wanted a puff job that would bring in fabulous ad revenues. I could write what I wished as long as I didn’t criticize the regime. I knew that The BBC had recently been banned from Iran because it reported negatively on the Shah. So I had to be careful.

This is what I discovered:

When young people learned that I was an American journalist, they came up to me and pleaded with me to write the truth about life in Iran under the Shah.

They told me about the killing of young student protesters, including those who worked in a university chemistry lab that mysteriously exploded. They complained that the Shah and his sister, Princess Ashraf, smuggled drugs that were used to saturate the students’ meeting places to dull their political actions. With lower tones, they described a fire in a local cinema that killed everyone inside because the doors were locked.

I observed the Shah’s hated, black-suited secret police, SAVAK, lurking on street corners in Teheran, watching through dark glasses for the possibility of a disturbance. I put these observations into a file, “What Charlotte Couldn’t Write,” silently vowing to honor the students’ request.

When the Shah was overthrown in 1979, I rejoiced, not knowing that his reign of terror would soon be followed by the religious extremism of the Islamic republic.

“What Charlotte Could Write”

The opportunity arose after Iranian students stormed the US embassy in Teheran in January 1979 and took 66 Americans hostage.

Photo source: Wikipedia

I followed the so-called “Hostage Crisis” with intense interest, and learned that some of the families whose loved ones were held in captivity began to question the official story put out by the U.S. State Department. As someone who had faced some stonewalling while investigating the death by plane crash of my diplomat/spy father, I felt a strong sense of empathy with one hostage family in particular.

Bonnie and Luzette Graves were the wife and daughter of John Graves, Public Affairs Officer at the US embassy. His posting to Iran was to try to improve relations with the new Iranian government that had overthrown the Shah. It was to be his last mission before retiring. Several months into the hostage taking, he sent his family a cryptic message in a letter: Watch out for Kissinger, Rockefeller, and Helms.” This warning sparked Mrs. Graves to do her own investigation, as she found it increasingly difficult to support the Administration’s handling of the crisis. Particularly galling was the State Department’s efforts, through the Family Liason Action Group (FLAG) to control what the hostage families knew, and what they said.

What got her and Luzette going was a 60 minutes expose on the Shah that aired on March 2, 1979. The segment, which the Carter Administration tried, unsuccessfully, to stop, detailed the Shah’s use of torture, his secret police collaboration with the C.I.A. and the intrigue which led to his admission into the U.S. for cancer treatment at the urging of David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger.

As I would write in a Nation cover story on the hostage families entitled Suffering in Silence ,the 60 Minutes program galvanized Bonnie and Luzette Graves to hold a press conference in their living room the following day. Before a flock of reporters they called for a Congressional investigation of American involvement in Iran and an apology from the Carter administration for past U.S schemes in Iran “It takes a strong nation to be able to say I’m sorry,” said Mrs. Graves. “What we need is a total re-examination of our foreign policy. We must cease our neo-colonialist activities that feed the fires that breed terrorism.”

Among those who responded was Republican Congressman George Hansen of Idaho, chairman of the House Banking Committee. who conducted two missions to Tehran and reported his findings to Congress.

The rest of the story

Shortly after the students seized the embassy, David Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan Bank encourage President Carter to freeze—and then seize--$ 8 billion worth of Iranian assets deposited in American banks. I wrote:

“Chase had handled up to $20 billion a year of Iranian oil revenues during the reign of the Shah, but by the summer of 1979, the Khomeini government had begun to withdraw large blocks of funds from Chase’s branches in Europe. Moreover, Chase had led an international consortium of banks in arranging up to $1.3 billion in loans to the Shah’s government in violation of the Shah’s own constitution and against the advice of Chase’s own lawyers in Teheran. Once the new revolutionary government came into power, it was within its legal right to challenge at any time the validity of those loans. Angry Chase shareholders might then feel obliged to file lawsuits against Chase for ignoring the advice of its lawyers.”

Here’s where John Graves’s warning began to make sense. I had read that the Teheran embassy warned President Carter that if he allowed the hated Shah into the U.S. for medical treatment, students would seize the embassy. Carter, bending to pressure from Rockefeller, Kissinger and (former US ambassador to Iran, Richard Helms) admitted him anyway. The embassy was attacked, and in response, the Iranian funds were seized. Bank crisis averted, while the hostages suffered 444 days in captivity,--until they were released on the day Ronald Reagan came into office. Currently, some tens of billions of dollars belonging to Iran have been frozen in bank accounts because of US sanctions

Final thoughts

I have always wondered whether the U.S. had any role in quietly supporting Ayatollah Khomeini as Iran’s new leader and have now found some evidence that it did. Washington’s post-Shah rationale centered on stopping Iran from falling into the Soviet orbit or into the hands of “communist sympathizers.” Notes the Guardian in its 2016 article: “Iranian leaders have reacted with fury to reports that newly declassified US diplomatic cables revealed extensive contacts between Ayatollah Khomeini and the Carter administration just weeks ahead of Iran’s Islamic revolution.”

But relations between the US and Iran have been rocky, to say the least. In the summer of 2025 Ttump threatened to eliminate the Supreme Ruler by declaring he knew where Khamenei’s was hiding “but we won’t kill you yet.” Meanwhile, news that the Shah’s son is ready to take over comes as no surprise.

Most humanitarian-minded people would welcome the end of over four decades of the Islamic Republic’s repressive theocratic regime. But will bringing back the Shah’s son make things better for the long-suffering Iranian people? I have my doubts.

You can see my previous posts at https://charlottedennett.substack.com/

Source: Reuters

In my previous substack on Trump’s obsession with Oil (Part I), I mentioned how former CEO of Exxon Mobil, Rex Tillerson, ended his short tenure as Trump I’s Secretary of State by concluding the president was “a fucking moron.” Now, some eight years later, the giant oil company has delivered yet another insult by declaring that Venezuela was “uninvestable” without significant changes. Among other considerations, It would take decades to repair the equipment that had deteriorated over decades of international sanctions against the socialist government. requiring an investment of billions of dollars, which Trump urged-- and U.S. oil companies rejected.

“I do not see a compelling business case for any US-based company to invest billions of dollars over years to decades to try to turn a profit in Venezuelan oil,” said Hugh Daigle, a professor with the University of Texas at Austin’s petroleum and geo-systems engineering department.”

Then there’s Trump’s abysmal ignorance of Latin sensitivities, on full display when he declared that he would run the country. How, skeptics asked, did he intend to safeguard such a huge investment when the country was politically unstable?

Something I learned while researching my book, Follow the Pipellines , was that no oil executive in his right mind would invest billions of dollars in a conflict zone without guaranteed military support. Nor would banks lend the money for such a risky venture. (Consider Prime Minister Benjamin Netenyahu’s military efforts to free Gaza as a conflict zone by ordering its wholesale destruction, the depopulation and removal of its people, and attempting the demilitarization of Hamas -- to make way for an energy corridor of pipelines feeding Israeli natural gas to an energy hungry Europe following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

In another likely miscalculation on Trump’s part, he was hurting some of his most loyal campaign donors, the independent oil companies that had profited handsomely by supplying fracked gas to Europe since the war in Ukraine.

According to the Guardian, “US frackers were already facing a global oil supply glut. Trump’s Venezuelan dream could make it worse.”

Even the wealthiest of frackers, Continental Oil’s Howard Hamm, expressed skepticism over Trump’s plans for Venezuela. “It excites me as an explorationist,” Hamm said, but added that that “Venezuela has its challenges,” a phrase, according to Oklahoma Energy Today, which s “widely interpreted as referencing the country’s history of nationalization, political instability, and asset seizures.”

I discovered Trump’s reliance on Hamm as a large campaign donor while writing a piece about his highly controversial 2020 fundraiser in Tulsa, Oklahoma. White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci opined that, “Trump’s decision to hold a rally in Tulsa, the location of the single worst incident of racial violence in American history, on Juneteenth… is abhorrent and a wink at his racist supporters.”

Trump changed the rally date to June 20^th, but kept the rally at Tulsa’s oil-funded Bank of Oklahoma, a short distance from what was once known as Black Wall Street.

Since then, Hamm has donated millions to Trump’s campaigns, and has become a leading force in rolling back Biden-era climate regulations and putting loyalists into Trump 2’s cabinet, including oil executive Chris Wright as energy secretary and Hamm’s friend Doug Burgum as interior secretary. Continental has fared well too: Burgun a former North Dakota governor is “a close ally of Mr. Hamm’s whose family has leased land to Continental for drilling.”

Some historical context from Indian country

To understand some of the origins of Big Oil’s power over indigenous peoples and nations, a short dive into Oklahoma history is instructive. The name Oklahoma comes from the Choctaw words okla (”people”) and homma (”red”), meaning “red people,” a term referencing the Indigenous tribes of the region.

In the early 1920s, Tulsa was known as the oil capital of the world. Among the Tulsan citizens who benefited from having oil underneath their land were former Black slaves who served as servants and cooks to the town’s white nouveau riche. They poured their savings into the all-black Greenwood neighborhood, turning it into the wealthiest black community in the United States, earning it the nickname of Black Wall Street. Their growing wealth did not sit well with Tulsa’s whites, who in May 1921 attacked the Greenwood neighborhood under false pretexts. After two days of burning and looting, the death toll was put at 100 black residents, with some 1,250 properties burned and 35 city blocks destroyed.

Black Wall Street reduced to rubble in Greenwood, Oklahoma. Harvard Gazette

In neighboring Osage Country, a similar campaign occurred against the Osage Indians, who had been awarded by the U.S. government “the oil, gas, coal or other minerals..reserved for the Osage tribe.” White resentment over the Osage’s oil wealth found a convenient vent: murder. Only in their case, the murders took place over a space of a few years, and were often inspired by the desire to take over the Osages’ oil-rich lands. According to Tulsa resident Rebecca Nagle in her chronicling of more of this ugly history for the Atlantic, “What is rarely told is how that frenzy of white wealth came after extreme theft and violence against black people, Native people, and those who experienced the compound racism of being both.”

The Indians of Oklahoma, driven to settle there in the late 19^th century, had petitioned the federal government to let them form their own state. But this never happened. The westward migration of white settlers into Indian territory would shatter any dreams of an all-Indian state. So too would the discovery of oil, as pools of the black gold were found seeping out of the lands of Indian territory.

A century later, we see the same phenomenon being inflicted on the Palestinian people, who do not have their own state, nor any control over the oil and gas deposits off the shores of Gaza which rightfully and legally belong to them.

The 1922 frenzy of white wealth in Oklahoma, resulting in the murders of Blacks and Native peoples, likely never crossed Trump’s mind as he held his campaign rally in Tulsa. The rally was deliberately provocative, with the usual racist references to “bad hombres” and “kung flu.” New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg noted that some of Trump’s closest advisors –including “white nationalist” Stephen Miller,” were sophisticated enough to know what message Trump wanted to send, noting “There’s simply no reason to believe that Trump is going to Tulsa to try to ease intercommunal hostility, rather than exacerbate it.” Left out of Goldberg’s analysis was the fact that Trump wanted Oklahomans’ oil money to fund his 2020 campaign, and he knew that Howard Hamm, who vigorously supported his 2016 race, would help.

Photo: Trump with Hamm in 2019 at an energy rally in Pittsburgh. Source: New York Times

This is our hemisphere: More lessons from Nelson Rockefeller

On January 4th, the White House and the State Department proclaimed a new version of the Monroe Doctrine with regard to Trump’s claim on Venezuela, claiming “this is our Hemisphere …and President Trump will not allow our security to be threatened.”

On January 18^th, under the New York Times headline: “This Hemisphere Belongs to All of Us,” Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva opined that the “ The United States’ bombings in Venezuelan territory and the capture of its president on Jan. 3 are yet another regrettable chapter in the continuous erosion of international law and the multilateral order established after World War II.”

One American who tried to institutionalize multilateral order during and after WWII was Nelson Rockefeller. As described in our book, Thy Will be Done. The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1942 appointed Rockefeller as Co-Ordinator of Inter-American Affairs. His job was to rid Latin America of Japanese and Italian influence and to secure U.S. control over the continent of South America. During this period, Rockefeller also became a prime mover in setting up the United Nations on his father’s property in Manhattan and establishing the framework of the United Nations at its 1945 founding in San Francisco.

Notes UN historian Phyllis Benis in her book, Calling the Shots: How Washington Dominates Today’s UN. “What the founders built was a global structure responsible not only for maintaining international peace and security (as defined by the Northern powers) but for implementing a broadly formulated worldwide political and economic system that would be imposed, operated, and controlled by the victors of World War II…Decolonization…was not on the founders’ agenda.”

Nor was protecting the Global South from imperial adventures.

As David Wallace-Wells aptly put it in the New York Times, “The country has long been a bully on the world stage, but one that has pretended to play nice, even as its full command over the globe has seemed recently to shrink.”

The people of Brazil. and this includes Lula, are well aware of U.S. interventions in Brazil, including the 1945 coup that overthrew the presidency of Getulio Vargas and the 1964 CIA-sponsored coup that overthrew President Jao Goulart. As described in Part I of this substack, Nelson Rockefeller was quietly involved in the coups against Vargas and Goulart. He relied heavily on Colonel J.C. King, who became the CIA’s Head of Clandestine Services for the Western Hemisphere during the 1950s and 60s.

That most Americans, both North and South, are unaware of the Rockefeller involvement is due in part to the Coordinator’s control over media outlets in South America, and Nelson’s sophisticated approach to conquering indigenous lands. He never telegraphed, as Trump is now doing, his intentions. He relied on J.C. King’s clandestine operations. Through King, who launched a months-long investigation of the Amazon, he knew that Goulart, like Vargas, was a nationalist who opposed massive corporate interventions in the Amazon. He also knew that President John F. Kennedy stymied his big plans for developing Brazil’s interior and also preferred giving government to government loans instead of private loans by banks, including David Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan bank.

Determined to achieve his dream of developing the Amazon, and with Kennedy gone by November, 1963, Nelson by March 1964 was able to rely on J.C. King to remove nationalist President Goulart from power. The conquest of the Amazon was off and running, with devastating consequences for Amazonian Indians. Norman Lewis, a reporter for the Sunday Times, described how the tribes had been ‘rushed to the verge of extinction. The tragedy of the Indian in the USA in the last century was being repeated, but it was being compressed into a shorten time.” The article ended by Lewis referring to “the disastrous impact of missionary activity.”

Two years after the 1964 coup, American evangelical missionaries (described in Part I) went about identifying “potentially hostile tribes” and pacifying them so as to lessen indigenous resistance to corporate incursions on their lands. The ploys once used in the conquest of the American West – leaving small-pox-laced blankets and arsenic-ladened candies on river banks – were widely used, along with direct military attacks when pacification techniques by missionaries failed. Over the next decade,100,000 Amazonian Indians perished.

As for Nelson Rockefeller, he escaped accountability, but he did endure humiliation when President Nixon sent him on a Presidential Mission to Latin America in 1969. Chaos greeted him in each country, as protesters in Nicaragua and Honduras cried “Rocky go Home,” rioters in Ecuador pelted his entourage with rocks, officials in Bolivia cut short his meeting for security fears, and his hosts in his beloved Venezuela disinvited him. In Brazil, under a dictatorship, thousands of students boycotted classes in protest, only to see their leaders subjected to kidnapping and torture.

Donald Trump is likely unaware of this history, as are most Americans. But today the tribes of Amazonia have become the most vocal protesters against corporate plunder of their lands and played a visible role at the recent COP climate conference in Belem, Brazil.

Trump’s refusal to send representatives to Belem was noticed and condemned, another factor that bodes ill for him should he order boots on the ground in Venezuela. President Maduro’s cries of “No blood for Oil No War for Oil” have reverberated throughout the Western Hemisphere, creating an atmosphere of resistance that may avert a war, while damaging Trump’s dream of getting the Nobel Peace Prize. The man who doesn’t read, who ignores history and lacks empathy, will go down in history as the worst president of the United States, and the cruel Bully of El Norte.

There is much more to be said about Big Oil’s power over governments that nationalize their oil, but I’ll save it for my next substack: on Iran, which I visited twice during the reign of the Shah, a valued ally of Nelson and David Rockefeller.

Source: Economic Times

Predictably, Maduro has denounced Trump’s actions as wanting to “colonize Venezuela to take our wealth…To the people of the United States, we say again and again, one and a thousand times: [in English] No blood for oil! No war for oil!” This slogan, once widely used to protest Bush’s war in Iraq, is now resonating across the Americas, most notably in Latin America’s largest economic powerhouses: Brazil and Mexico.

Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has warned of a “humanitarian catastrophe” if Trump goes through with his promise of armed intervention. Brazil, which shares a border with Venezuela, is a key ally of Venezuela with a strong historical memory of US-sponsored regime change efforts (more on this below).Lula has offered to mediate between Trump and Maduro to avoid a “dangerous precedent of extra-regional military power in South America.”

Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum has urged the United Nations to intervene to maintain peace.

But Trump doesn’t seem to care. Doing the bidding of oil companies with his “Drill Baby Drill” mantra has brought in $219 million of campaign donations. That should tell us something. Here are some more clues as to Trump’s modus vivendi:

At the outset of his 2016 Presidency, he made his first international visit to Saudi Arabia instead of to a Western ally, as was diplomatic tradition.

And in 2017, again defying precedent, he appointed former CEO of ExxonMobil Rex Tillerson as his Secretary of State, hoping that Tillerson would help forge ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Tillerson only lasted a year, having concluded that Trump was a “fucking moron.” Trump fired him in March 2018. “It was challenging for me,” Tillerson told a reporter, “coming from the disciplined, highly process-oriented Exxon Mobil corporation . . . to go to work for a man who is pretty undisciplined, doesn’t like to read, doesn’t read briefing reports, doesn’t like to get into the details of a lot of things, but rather just kind of says, ‘This is what I believe.’”

Trump’s appalling ignorance was again on full display when, in 2019, he ordered the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Eastern Syria, there purportedly to fight ISIS. The backlash in Washington was immediate, forcing him to change his mind and order them back, in order to “protect our oil fields.” An embarrassing slip-up to be sure, but soon forgotten by media analyses of Trump’s foreign policy

Recently inviting Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, to the White House ruffled feathers in D.C., since it was MBS (otherwise known as Mohammed Bone Saw) who ordered the assassination-by-hacking of a Washington Post reporter and Saudi critic, Jamal Khashoggi.

But when Trump ordered a blockade of Venezuelan oil tankers, members of Congress have been getting an earful from their constituents. Why, voters question, should American soldiers risk their lives for oil? It is this very question that has been kept under wraps for a century in order to protect regime change agendas of Big Oil.

Now Trump’s Bully Boy approach is back-firing, only strengthening the Maduro regime’s resolve to resist U.S. armed intervention. The world has changed since the massive US defeats in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, making regime change on behalf of the United States more difficult to achieve. According to a recent poll cited by The Hill, 63 percent of Americans oppose going to war with Venezuela. Latin Americans, for their part, have a long history and bitter memories of CIA coups during the Cold War. No coup can succeed without the support of the military, and so far the Venezuelan military remains loyal to Maduro.

Commented Venezuela Defense Minister: “The Armed Forces categorically reject the delusional statements made by Mr. Trump. He has claimed we have stolen the oil that lies under our land. The truth has been revealed. It’s not about ‘narco-terrorism’. It’s all about the oil.”

Standard Oil heir Nelson Rockefeller must be rolling in his grave. If there were one singular lesson the Rockefellers learned from over a century of managing their empire of oil (including Creole Petroleum in Venezuela) it was this: Don’t go into a country with a sledge hammer. (Think Bush’s invasion of Iraq) Focus on developing economic and political relations with leaders, while using soft power (like U.S. AID grants) to win over hearts and minds. Only when leaders seriously resist should regime change be considered, and then with careful, quiet preparation relying on an army of social and political scientists and seasoned military experts. Nelson Rockefeller, working with these experts, including his brother, Chase CEO David Rockefeller, was key to bringing national economies into North American markets, using this model of development.

Venezuela: Nelson Rockefeller’s Proving Ground

As a young man Nelson frequently visited his family’s major oil holding in Venezuela, Creole Petroleum, and got his first taste of how the company’s repressive labor and social policies stirred deep resentment among its workers.

Long before he became Governor of New York in 1959, Nelson Rockefeller learned how to successfully steer U.S. corporate policy in Latin America during and after World War II —  without overtly engaging in grandiose Trumpian ploys like the gunboat diplomacy of the late 19th and early 20th century. Rockefeller mastered the art of regime change covertly. befitting the most powerful oil-rich family of the 20th century.

Most readers are probably not aware of Nelson’s role in Latin America. It took Gerard Colby and me 18 years to document it in our book, Thy Will be Done.The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil (HarperCollins 1995) The book has been called an anatomy of conquest, with lessons on how to rule that can be — and are — applied to many parts of the world, including Southeast Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

So how, you might wonder, did Nelson Rockefeller’s early experiences in Venezuela lead to wider horizons?

Venezuela’s Creole Petroleum was formed in 1920 as a subsidiary of Standard Oil in order to exploit the oil of Lake Maracaibo and provide a steady supply of fuel to the American military and industrial complex. By World War II it was the world’s largest oil exporter — surpassed only in 1950 by another Rockefeller company in Saudi Arabia, Standard Oil of California (now Chevron).

On some of Nelson’s visits to the Creole oil compound in the late 1930s, he was spotted carrying a copy of Karl Marx’s Das Capital under his arm, so concerned was he that Creole’s harsh labor policies would invite a Communist takeover and the nationalization of Venezuela’s oil. He had developed a sensitivity to nationalist sentiments during his honeymoon in India, where he met Mohandas Gandhi and learned of Ghandi’s huge following against British colonial rule. Nelson became a convert to “indirect rule.” Rather than aping the Brits’ direct colonial rule over their subjects, which had generated deep resentment throughout Asia and Latin America. Nelson believed in forging relations with national elites, understanding their needs for economic development, and introducing reforms to Creole’s managers, who were stuck in British ways. He ordered the removal of barbed wire that segregated Creole workers, introduced public health clinics, and supported the teaching of Spanish to Creole’s managers. He became a fervent believer in adopting indirect rule throughout Latin America, and eventually caught the attention of President Franklin Roosevelt on the eve of America’s entry into World War II

In July 1941, President Roosevelt appointed Nelson to become Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, a position designed to replace growing German and Italian influence in Latin America while creating American hegemony over the entire continent.

Nelson Rockefeller as FDR’s Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs

Nelson used this position to meet with Latin American presidents, generals, bankers and industrialists to achieve these goals.

The Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA) became one of the most glamourous and well-funded government departments during the war. With a host of paid experts making connections with leaders at his command, The Coordinator served corporate interests well by developing pro-American feelings, assisted in large part by his support of a massive propaganda apparatus using radio stations and films to penetrate Latin America.

The Coordinator’s penetration of Latin America with radio

His ultimate agenda was to develop Latin America’s enormous natural resources — especially due to repeated reports of oil in the Amazon — without encountering indigenous resistance. (Most of the vast Amazon River Basin’s rainforest is in Brazil, but it encompases 9 countries, including Colombia, Peru, Guyana, Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela). Evangelical US missionaries, known in the US as the Wycliffe Bible Translators and in Catholic Latin America as the secular-sounding Summer Institute of Linguists (SIL), proved helpful in preparing tribal peoples to surrender to corporate incursions on their lands. SIL’s technique for winning indigenous hearts and minds rested on teaching the tribes to read and write in their own languages by translating the New Testament of the Bible into their native tongues. The missionaries also provided useful intelligence as to which tribes were “hostile,” as opposed to those who accepted pacification through literacy. The missionaries’ overall message to their wards: “Obey the Government, for all Authority Comes from God.”

The coup against Brazilian president Getulio Vargas

For all his reform efforts, this didn’t mean Nelson eschewed regime change when deemed necessary. But unlike Trump who impulsively ordered a massive American armada off the coast of Venezuela while publicizing his intensions ahead of time, Nelson called on his trusted experts to pave the way behind the scenes. His initial courting of Brazilian president Getulio Vargas turned sour once Vargas sensed his true intentions: US control of Brazil’s vast Amazonian resources. Undeterred, Nelson drew on assistance from Col. J.C. King, vice president of Johnson & Johnson in charge of rubber operations in Brazil and Argentina (a source of the drug company’s condoms!) to fulfill his “shining dream” of developing the Brazilian Amazon. He sent King on a survey of the Amazon’s oil deposits. Helped by Rockefeller, King was made a colonel in Army Intelligence and would later serve as the CIA’s Chief of Clandestine )perations in the Western Hemisphere when John F. Kenedy was president — to be explained in Part II of this newsletter on Trump’s oil fixation.

As Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, Rockefeller also relied on his trusted friend and mentor, Adolf Berle, as the new U.S. Ambassador to Brazil, to keep a sharp eye on Vargas. The Brazilian president had become a symbol of Brazilian nationalism whose re-election as Brazil’s President was deemed an obstacle to US ambitions.

Summoning his considerable diplomatic skills, Berle helped win over the military in a plot to successfully depose Vargas in 1945. Vargas regained the presidency in 1951, running on the theme “the oil is ours”, while blaming Berle and American oil companies for the coup. A year later Vargas established the government-owned Petroleum Company of Brazil (Petrobras). By1954, he was again under attack by generals dependent on Standard Oil’s largesse, who accused him of corruption and demanded his resignation while surrounding the presidential palace with U.S.-made tanks. Instead, rather than surrender, President Vargas shot himself in his bedroom, leaving behind a suicide note that deeply affected the Brazilian pubic. “I wanted to create national freedom in realizing oil wealth through Petrobras…They [international groups allied with national groups} do not want the people to be independent…My sacrifice will maintain you united and my blood shall be your banner of struggle.”

Brazilians react to the death of Vargas. Source: Brazil national archives

Vargas’s suicide seriously damaged America’s s prestige in Latin America, as did the CIA’s coup in Guatemala the following year (1954). The Eisenhower Administration turned to Nelson Rockefeller to rectify the situation. In 1954, “Ike” appointed Rockefeller as a special assistant to the president in Cold War Strategy and Psychological Warfare. This put Nelson Rockefeller in charge of all CIA covert operations along with CIA director Allen Dulles.

In Part II: Whether overt or covert, the historical follies of regime change are now being visited on Donald J. Trump

PS: This is my third substack. You can see the two earlier ones,Welcome to my Substack and The Biggest Culprits in Death and Destruction, by going to charlottedennett.substack.com to see the full archive of my posts.

I addressed this at the 40th anniversary convention of Veterans for Peace in July and again in their Special Issue on Climate and Militarism, Peace and Planet News, Summer 2025 p. 13) and wouldn’t you know, it was vets who wholeheartedly embraced this broader notion.

And why wouldn’t they? They know the importance of fueling the military for successful campaigns, as do superpowers who have never forgotten the lessons of why Germany lost World War I and World War II: its tanks, lorries and air force ran out of gas!

Anti-war protesters have long focused on the dangers of militarism, but again, not so much on how oil fuels endless wars. This is starting to change, thankfully. See for instance OilChangeInternational, which has been tracking which countries and companies are fueling Israel’s war in Gaza.)

I’ll unpack all these angles in future newsletters. (The next one will focus on Trump’s dependence on Big Oil) coinciding with his absence from the COP 30 conference in Brazil), but for now, I’ll address a frequent question from friends and observers:

Why do I put so much focus on oil when other resources, like gold, copper, uranium and lithium, are widely sought after and fought for throughout the world, not to mention rare earth minerals in this age of AI? Let me assure you that I will deal with them too. And the military-industrial complex that benefits. But for the immediate future, I want to focus on Big Oil because it is the biggest factor in the destruction of our planet, including endless wars, in addition to climate change.

First, there is the indisputable fact that oil continues to be the most sought after resource because it continues to be the fuel the world’s militaries, it is widely censored from the news out of concern for national security. After all, what parents would want to send their sons and daughters into harm’s way if they knew that they were risking their lives to increase the profits of oil companies? And now, fracked gas is being used to power AI Data Centers.

According to MIT’s Technology Review, AI “could keep us dependent on natural gas for decades.” And data centers are springing up all over the South — notably in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. “It’s a long-term commitment in absolutely the wrong direction,” says Greg Buppert, a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center in Charlottesville, Virginia. If all the proposed gas plants get built in the South over the next 15 years, he says, “we’ll just have to accept that we won’t meet emissions reduction goals.” Oh Gawd. No wonder some of Trump’s first words in his Inauguration Speech in January were Drill Baby Drill.”

Then there’s the fact that Big Oil is one of the most powerful lobbies in Congress, so you never (or hardly ever) hear our elected representatives talk about the oil connection to war. Even progressive journalists won’t touch it, to my dismay. It seems that the word is out: Don’t touch the oil connection to endless wars if you want to survive financially…or survive, period!

Recently a young and very brave woman named Misti Leon became the first to sue six giant oil companies for the wrongful death of her mother, who died in a heat dome. Ms. Leon has accused Big Oil of failure to warn about the dangers of fossil fuel emissions.

As an attorney who has also sued for wrongful death [as well as written books about oil) I was intrigued, especially after reading Big Oil’s defense as articulated by the lawyer for Chevron: “both Democrats and Republicans have promoted fossil fuel production in the interest of national security.”

A third reason for my initial focus on Big Oil is a personal one.

My father, Daniel Dennett, headed up U.S. counter-intelligence in the Middle East from 1944 to his mysterious death by plane crash in 1947.

Daniel Dennett is second from left with members of the Lebanese Parliament

When he was posted to Lebanon in 1944 by the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), he quickly learned our key allies in World War II (England, France, and the Soviet Union) were intensely jealous of the US gaining an exclusive concession in Saudi Arabia. He was sent to the Middle East not to spy on the Germans (who were no longer a threat in 1944) but on our allies! When he summed up his marching orders for the OSS before heading to Beirut, he wrote that the oil of Saudi Arabia was so important to US interests that “we must control the oil at all costs.” This, I discovered while researching my latest book, Follow the Pipelines: Uncovering the Mystery of a Lost Spy and the Deadly Politics of the Great Game for Oil, that the phrase “at all costs” has become a meme for all the wars in the Middle East.

Two years later, in 1946, my father was appointed as Chief of Station for the Central Intelligence Group (immediate predecessor of the CIA). The war over, he rightly predicted that there would be “a real free for all” among competing powers, including our wartime allies, to grab more oil. It is my belief that he became one of the first American victims of what I call The Great Game for Oil.

The plance crash in Ethiopia that killed my father and five other Americans

But the American public continues to be shielded from the oil connection to fueling wars and the fact that big powers — even our purported allies — are constantly competing against each other for access to the treasured fuel. The proxy war in Ukraine between the Russians and the US –the world’s most powerful petropowers — is a prime example.

As a lead-in to my next Substack on Trump’s addiction to oil, my hat’s off to Christiana Figueres, a former climate expert for the UN who played a huge role in the Paris Climate Accords and is a major figure at the current COP30 meetings in Belem, Brazil During her interview with Christiane Amanpour on November 7 about worldwide efforts to dismantle an emerging green economy, Amanpour asked Figueres, “Who is benefiting the most?” from Trump’s taking the US out of the Paris accords. “Is it China doing better than the US?”. To which Figueres bluntly replied: “In the US, it’s the fossil fuel Industry who put quite a lot of capital” in Trump’s campaign for re-election. “He is beholden to them. He is scared if we continue to transform industry toward clean energy, which means there will be less [oil] experts.”

But that’s only part of the story. Stay tuned.

It’s been brewing for months, as I’ve contemplated writing essays on US oil-based interventions in a) the Middle East (in line with my most recent book, Follow the Pipelines: Uncovering the Mystery of a Lost Spy and the Deadly Politics of the Great Game for Oil) and b) Latin America (our joint work: Thy Will Be Done. The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil). Also, you’ll find lessons learned from Jerry’s first book on the chemical giant that brought us forever chemicals like PFAS (DuPont Dynasty: Behind the Nylon Curtain) and from my being active in the women’s movement (I led Vermont NOW in our historic state -ERA campaign, which lost by a tiny margin thanks to the evangelicals and their nasty propaganda (ERA = AIDS) in rural areas.

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So stay tuned for revelations that come from our enduring quest to know cui bono-- despite the suppression of our Rockefeller and DuPont books. (Ever heard of the word “privishing” ? It means to pull out all the promotional life support of a book, ie to fullfill a publisher’s legal contractual obligation to print the book, but later privately publish (eitheer because it did not meet expectations, or someone powerful has interfered with it) so the book sinks without a trace .Thankfully, both books were updated and rescued from oblivion (thanks to Prof. Mark Crispin Miller) as ebooks through Openroadmedia’s Forbidden Bookshelf. They are also available through Amazon.

Despite HarperCollins deep-sixing Thy Will be Done, we have tried to warn our fellow citizens of the growing power of evangelicals in the Americas, North and South, secretly aided and abetted by huge corporate power that use them to pacify indigenous resistance to incursions on their resource-rich lands. Now look at where we are. Evangelicals are Trump’s most devoted base in MAGA-land, as well as in Netanyahu’s coterie of genocidal fascists.

How far we have come from 1944, when Jews who escaped the Nazi killing machines found refuge in Palestine, and who were the first to hold up signs protesting the US’s favoring Saudi oil over Jewish lives, stating “No Blood for Oil.” (More on that in my coming posts on Gaza, gleaned in part from my suing the CIA and getting declassified documents by my father, America’s first master-spy in the Middle East. He died in a mysterious plane crash in 1947 after his top secret mission to Saudi Arabia to determine the safest route for the Trans-Arabian Pipeline: Should it terminate in Lebanon or Palestine? One thing was certain: “We must,” he wrote, “control the oil at all costs.” Consider the costs of human lives in over seven decades of wars in the Middle East.

Getting Started

What finally got me to kicking off a Substack was the massive No Kings demonstrations on October 18^th. Truly inspiring. Imagine: seven million marching in one day without acts of violence that could have triggered attacks from Trump hooligans, if not members of a federalized national guard. It got me to thinking about how powerful people’s historical memories can be, boiled down in this country to the unalterable fact that our American ancestors successfully fought a revolution against monarchy, against British rule. No Kings succinctly embodies that sacred memory, as compared to Trump’s crass and disgusting AI video of him flying overhead dumping excrement on the protesters. That, and his appalling demolition of the East Wing of the White House for a royal ballroom, which will go down in history, I hope, as symbols of just how unhinged, how out of touch, and how dangerous, the 47^th president was.

History is full of lessons. We should never forget the traumas endured and remembered by the survivors of genocide, whether in the U.S. or Latin America, Europe or the Middle East, Israel or Gaza, Asia or Africa. By climbing to the top of the mountain where power resides, we can get a better understanding of who is responsible for such massive suffering, and we can strive to hold them accountable. In short, Cui bono? As one definition of this Latin phrase puts it, “Cui bono intends to cut through distractions and irrelevant details of a case to focus on motive – especially financial motive.” It may not be the only motive, but it’s the one most censored from our daily news. That and historical context. It’s my aim to fill in the blanks, as best I can. I hope you will join me.

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