Excerpted from Foreword by Daniel Yergin

There's a reason that, for so many years, people have spoken of oil men. During most of the history of the oil industry, though increasingly less true today, most of the people who made the decisions, whether in oil companies or oil-exporting countries, were men. And yet, over those many decades, there were two women who would have a decisive influence on the industry. Both were journalists, and neither hesitated to take on the most powerful.

One was the courageous Ida Tarbell, who at the beginning of the twentieth century published her history of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Trust. That book has been described as the single most influential book on business ever published in America. It certainly helped energize Theodore Roosevelt to launch the great antitrust case that broke up Standard Oil in 1911.

But the other woman? She is much less well known. Her name? Wanda. This is not to be familiar; that's what people called her. After all, there was only one Wanda in the oil world, and that was Wanda Jablonski, who wielded enormous influence over the industry from the 1950s through the 1980s. Her life and her work have much to teach us about her era, oil and politics, and her own craft - and about independence and courage. It also provides a powerful perspective on today's critical questions about oil and energy, and about the complex relations between countries that import and countries that export oil and natural gas.

Wanda Jablonski was the real-time chronicler of the era when oil came to fuel the world economy, inflame nationalism, and ignite political turmoil. Moreover, as both an insider and an outsider, she had considerable effect on how it all turned out.

I first got to know Wanda in 1982 when we met at a seminar in a hacienda outside Mexico City. At that time, it was just becoming apparent that the price of oil, in the aftermath of the crises of the 1970s, was not going to spike to $100 a barrel, as had been much predicted, but was more likely headed down. Professor Robert Mabro, who ran the Oxford Energy Seminar, gave a talk on what was changing, and Wanda realized it was news. She chucked her role as a seminar participant, and while the rest of us dutifully went back to our proceedings, she sat down in the courtyard with Mabro. There under the sun, smoking one cigarette after another, she worked with him, and, as he later said, pushed him hard to turn his informal remarks into polished, pointed prose in time to meet her weekly deadline.

Some years later, I turned to her when I was researching my book, The Prize. After first putting me off, she met me in the bar at the Carlyle Hotel, where she turned the tables and thoroughly interrogated me, and finally agreed. We began the first of what turned out to be several interviews, and then she took me back to her apartment, where she pulled out various papers and old documents. I remember that she was particularly touched by an article about her father, "Eugene Jablonski Returns to Botany," in Garden Journal. But it was her stories that really held me, about the oil ministers and the sheikhs, and about those who simultaneously were their collaborators and antagonists - the heads of companies and the tycoons. She had known them all.

I sought her out again to see if I could persuade her to go on television for the PBS/BBC documentary version of The Prize. Camera-shy, and cautious about being interviewed publicly, she said no. Finally, Sue Lena Thompson, who worked with me on the project, sat up late into the night talking with her and at last won her over. But then, in January 1992, shortly before we were to film her, she suddenly died. It was a huge loss for history and for the series - she would have stolen the show.

Now, in this compelling new biography, Anna Rubino tells Wanda's story, the whole story, which has never been told before. Rubino is uniquely qualified to do it: she worked in Wanda's newsroom in the 1980s and wrote her Ph.D. dissertation about Wanda at Yale University under the guidance of the eminent historian John Morton Blum. Anyone interested in the Middle East, journalism, oil - or the changing role of women - will find Queen of the Oil Club fascinating. But her story has much broader appeal. For here is a woman who, without riches or family connection, used her ingenuity, her perseverance, and her high standards as a journalist to challenge the status quo and to get people to see the world in new ways. Wanda's life story provides intimate insight into the movement that led to the oil crises of the 1970s and still affects today's geopolitical conflict in the Middle East, Latin America, and the former Soviet Union - the rise of oil nationalism. This book is an important contribution to the historical record because it tells, from Wanda's perspective, the story of how these oil nationalists came to challenge the seemingly all-powerful oil companies...

Wanda was a truly audacious journalist who knew how to say that the emperor had no clothes. Other journalists were in awe of her, both because of her scoops and because her influence on the oil industry set new standards in business journalism for investigative reporting (even if the term itself was not yet in vogue). She was reporting on an industry known for its secrecy and for the entangling of politics and business in the service of national security, sovereignty, economic growth, and government revenues. She had to withstand many challenges - being grilled at the age of twenty-eight by the board of the world's biggest oil company, handling taunts from intimidating congressmen, avoiding jail time in Iraq when suspected of being a spy. She was also particularly brave in dealing with threats to her reputation and that of her staff.

Through her travels and reporting from the Middle East in the 1950s and 1960s, Wanda developed a perspective quite different from that of the Western oil industry, which led to stories and insights she would not have gained otherwise. She could also better see what was coming, for she grasped the consequences of the legacy of colonialist rule and the quest for sovereignty. She tried to communicate this in print and in person. "You never get beneath the surface," she chided the CEO of one of the Western oil giants. She advised him to "do yourself a favor" and get beyond "the red carpet treatment."

Anna Rubino has been a sleuth in pursuit of Wanda's story. She got exclusive access to Wanda's private papers, and she tracked down and interviewed more than a hundred people who knew Wanda, including former oil executives and oil ministers, Mobil Oil's long-retired chauffeur in London, a Catholic nun who remembered deep tensions between Wanda and her mother - and, of course, Wanda's colleagues, who knew what a demanding, difficult, and mercurial boss she could be. Rubino has searched through national archives on both sides of the Atlantic and even found Wanda's surviving relatives in Slovakia.
The result is Queen of the Oil Club, which shows a remarkable woman in action. This is a riveting life story that illuminates a whole era - and certainly helps make sense of our own times.

Daniel Yergin

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Excerpted from Chapter 4: Savoring the Bedouin Brew

Walking the Harem Gauntlet

Wanda admitted that she did not know what to say or do in the presence of King Saud. Since women were forbidden by Saudi law to enter the king's palace, the king received Wanda in his harem--the women's quarters--where no man except the king could go. To reach him, she had to pass through a gauntlet of several hundred long-robed, black-veiled women, all relatives of the king. They whispered and giggled as she gingerly walked on Persian carpets at least three hundred feet toward Saud. The sight of an uncovered woman, with curly hair and a Western business suit, was both fascinating and humorous. "It was my short hair that seemed to astound them most," Wanda later said. "Don't forget--they'd never seen a Western woman."

Seated on a raised dais at the opposite end of the audience chamber, the king looked formidable from a distance. "I couldn't have been more nervous," Wanda recalled. Suddenly, her female interpreter broke away, rushed up toward the king, prostrated herself in front of him, and kissed his feet. Astonished, Wanda did not know what to do. She edged forward but then stopped about twenty feet from him. Was she expected to kiss his feet, too?

Sensing her confusion, King Saud extended his hand, so she walked forward and shook it. "You are welcome," he told her. "All Americans are welcome, like my own children." She replied in Arabic but made a mistake; what she said meant, "You are welcome to my house." "Imagine me welcoming the king to his own house!" she later exclaimed. But it helped: "That got a laugh and eased the tension." Saud's children then came in and swarmed all over him as they each got a kiss. "It was a big family scene," she recalled, and a typical one. The king, she learned, spent that hour in the harem every day, mainly to see his children.(1)

Despite her awkward start and the press of children, Wanda was determined to get comments from the king. She asked several questions, including sensitive political queries about the Suez Canal, but all of his answers came back the same: "We are all Arab brothers and Arab brothers love each other."(2) In the end, all he gave her were gifts: a watch with a royal insignia and two harem dresses woven from solid gold thread, much too heavy for her to wear.(3)

Although Saud did not tell her anything of significance, her experience was so unusual that she gave more details about the harem visit when she returned to the United States in the spring of 1957. During a cross-country speaking tour, she was featured on local radio and television programs and in several newspapers. This "pert, pretty young American," reported the Los Angeles Mirror-News, was "one of the few Westerners ever admitted to an Arabian harem." At the Los Angeles press briefing, Wanda explained Saudi customs and dispelled some myths. The king had as many as four wives at any one time, as permitted by the Koran, she explained, for reasons that had "nothing to do with licentiousness." Because Saudi Arabia was a recent amalgamation of many tribes, "what's the best way to cement bonds between the various tribes and the King?" she asked. "Arrange a marriage between the chief daughter of the tribe and the ruler." When the king fathered a son by this queen, she continued, "he has given her tribe a prince of royal lineage. Whether she remains permanently in the harem or returns divorced, to the tribe, she is always a person of consequence and much respected."(4)

The king did not eat with women, Wanda explained, so she dined with one of his wives and other leading ladies for nearly two hours. They started with tea, steeped with rose petals from the king's garden, and ended with American coffee, brewed in her honor. It was a "perfectly gay hen party," Wanda wrote to her colleagues. One queen told Wanda that she was "too thin and should be fatter if I am to find a husband and have a prince." She did not mention to the queen, who thought her single, that she was actually still married. Nor did she mention the eunuchs guarding the king's harem, who "looked right through her."(5)

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(1)Mirror-News (Los Angeles), June 14, 1957; Wanda Jablonski, interview by Daniel Yergin, Daniel Yergin Papers, Cambridge, MA.

(2)Mirror-News, ibid.

(3)Daily Journal (Caracas), December 6, 1957.

(5) Ibid.; Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 517. W. E. Turner to WJ, April 16, 1957; Knox Bourne to Harry Waddell, June 17, 1957; Leslie Recordings to WJ, June 17, 1957, Wanda Jablonski Papers, Energy Intelligence, New York. Also see similar account, Daily Mirror (Caracas), December 6, 1957.