Anna Rubino, a journalist and historian with a Ph.D. from Yale, has covered oil and business news from New York and Brussels. She started working as a reporter for Wanda Jablonski's Petroleum Intelligence Weekly. Since then, her work has appeared in Business Week, the International Herald Tribune, and other publications and Internet news sites. Rubino is now an investigative reporter for OTR Global (formerly Off The Record Research), a San Francisco-based investment news service, and lives in North Carolina. Queen of the Oil Club is her first book.
While working as a reporter for PIW in the 1980s, I got to know Wanda personally, heard some of her stories about the Middle East, and even traveled with her once to Mexico for interviews and a visit to offshore oil fields. When Wanda died in 1992, I helped put together a PIW memorial edition and was surprised to find that many of the seemingly far-fetched stories I had heard were actually true. I found the evidence in Wanda's personal files.
However, Wanda was no pack rat. At her death, those personal papers consisted of two boxes of her newspaper and magazine articles from 1944 to 1962, one box of professional correspondence, and another one of personal effects, including a dozen appointment diaries, a photo album, a small collection of personal letters and papers, and her childhood report cards. For someone who wrote for a living, Wanda conceded to friends, she did not like to write. It made her bite her nails. She kept no personal diaries, no notebooks. Despite her prolific output of articles, she left few traces of her inner life.
Intrigued by the woman and the legend, I decided to investigate Wanda Jablonski's influence on the international oil industry and business journalism for a Yale University Ph.D. dissertation in history. To do that, I had to become a detective. Even though I got exclusive access to Wanda's papers, I dug into newly declassified American and British government documents and found some gems. I also unearthed private diaries and personal papers on both sides of the Atlantic. Along the way, I pieced together the back stories of many incidents, even uncovering evidence that an Iranian oil official was a spy for British Petroleum in the 1960s, not Wanda - as some had assumed. And although Wanda's personal life remains something of a mystery, I found a few colorful details that give real insight, including a romance with an ex-Jesuit that soured on a trip to the Middle East.
Oral history also became a critical research tool. I interviewed over a hundred persons for the biography, including retired CEOs of major oil companies; former oil ministers; other leading officials from Venezuela, Iran, and Kuwait; as well as U.S. ambassadors, senior CIA officials, and many journalists. In a five-hour interview with Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, Saudi Arabia's former oil minister, he revealed for the first time how his long-time friend, Wanda Jablonski, got him out of virtual house arrest in 1986 shortly after he was fired and what it meant to him. I also tracked down people who knew Wanda personally, from Oxford to Paris, Bratislava to Houston: Wanda's ex-husband, two Slovak cousins, a Kuwaiti Wanda used to meet in Beirut bars, a Catholic nun who knew her mother, and Mobil Oil's London chauffeur who remembered Wanda's father.
Because her story is so riveting, because she was a courageous woman in a notoriously macho world, because she used the power of information to illuminate the shadowy world of global oil politics, Wanda Jablonksi deserves this full-fledged biography.