Cyrus
12-21-2003, 05:36 AM
A long time ago, four young Arabs were in London on a night out. Two of them were young military officers, undergoing some specialized training in Britain, and having one of their rare leaves from school. They all dined at the hotel Ambassadeurs, and sat around talking about their British hosts, sports, and a few world politics. After dinner, instead of heading off to their homes directly, they went upstairs to take in the sights at the hotel's cardroom, which, as most cardrooms at the time in Britain, was operating shall we say very dicreetly. They were a bit taken aback by the amounts of money being exchanged at the tables.
One of the Arab military men thought a player at a poker table, who seemed to be stuck, looked familiar. He asked his fellow officer and he was informed that the guy at the table was indeed an Arab, a fellow Libyan as a matter of fact, and moreover, a personal confidant and assistant to HM King Idris of Libya. The first officer was astonished and watched the game more intently.
The Arab player was involved in some sort of macho battle against a Greek shipowner. The piles of chips in every pot kept going higher. Some serious amounts of dollars were changing hands but it became boring after awhile and the young Arabs asked their friend to leave.
"No, I want to stay some more. I want to watch how they spend the money they are stealing from us", the first officer, who was actually Libyan himself, muttered to his friends. They all stayed for a couple of hours more and the young Libyan did not once take his eyes off the Libyan poker player who kept losing hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The incident had a profound effect on the young officer. He did not stop talking about it for weeks afterward. He was, of course, the future Libyan Colonel Kaddafi, who upon returning to his home country, got involvd with great zeal into one of the many military plots to overthrow the King's government. In the end, the young Colonel was named head of the self-styled Revolutionary Council and executed a bloodless coup d' etat when Idris was away on a trip to Turkey. The new regime did not nationalize the foreign oil companiues, but, after a few months, the Colonel achieved the unthinkable, by forcing Conoco to sign a contract whereby the oil company would now pay 50 cents for every barrel of Libyan crude oil, a five-fold increase in the purchase price.
[The incident was related by one of the other three Arabs present, HE Al Amun, the future Sheikh of Oman, to Leonard Mosley, and was revealed in a 1981 book written by maverick French politician Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber.]
One of the Arab military men thought a player at a poker table, who seemed to be stuck, looked familiar. He asked his fellow officer and he was informed that the guy at the table was indeed an Arab, a fellow Libyan as a matter of fact, and moreover, a personal confidant and assistant to HM King Idris of Libya. The first officer was astonished and watched the game more intently.
The Arab player was involved in some sort of macho battle against a Greek shipowner. The piles of chips in every pot kept going higher. Some serious amounts of dollars were changing hands but it became boring after awhile and the young Arabs asked their friend to leave.
"No, I want to stay some more. I want to watch how they spend the money they are stealing from us", the first officer, who was actually Libyan himself, muttered to his friends. They all stayed for a couple of hours more and the young Libyan did not once take his eyes off the Libyan poker player who kept losing hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The incident had a profound effect on the young officer. He did not stop talking about it for weeks afterward. He was, of course, the future Libyan Colonel Kaddafi, who upon returning to his home country, got involvd with great zeal into one of the many military plots to overthrow the King's government. In the end, the young Colonel was named head of the self-styled Revolutionary Council and executed a bloodless coup d' etat when Idris was away on a trip to Turkey. The new regime did not nationalize the foreign oil companiues, but, after a few months, the Colonel achieved the unthinkable, by forcing Conoco to sign a contract whereby the oil company would now pay 50 cents for every barrel of Libyan crude oil, a five-fold increase in the purchase price.
[The incident was related by one of the other three Arabs present, HE Al Amun, the future Sheikh of Oman, to Leonard Mosley, and was revealed in a 1981 book written by maverick French politician Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber.]