The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

by Daniel Yergin

Twitchell returned to Saudi Arabia in February 1933 in the company of Lloyd Hamilton, a lawyer for Socal, to initiate their negotiations with Ibn Saud’s minister of finance, Abdullah Suleiman. They were up against a cunning and masterly opponent. Suleiman was the brother of the King’s private secretary. A Nadji by birth—most of the other senior administrators were Syrians, Egyptians and Libyans—he had, as a young man, been an assistant to an Arab merchant in Bombay, where he had learned much about trading and business. The King had nicknamed him “my support.” In fact, this “frail little man of uncertain age” was the most powerful person in Ibn Saud’s inner circle, with responsibility not only for finance, but also for defense and the Pilgrimage. He was “the ultimate eminence grise, always self-effacing and keeping himself in the wings,” said Ibn Saud’s interpreter, but with “power and influence so monumental that I often thought of him as the uncrowned King of Arabia.”