Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954, The Near and Middle East, Volume IX, Part 1

PPS files, lot 64 D 563, “Strategic materials (oil)”

No. 281
Report by the Department of Justice ¹

top secret
NSC 138/1

Washington , [January 6, 1953.]

The Grand Jury Investigation of the International Oil Cartel

1. Following cancellation of wartime suspension of anti-trust investigations and prosecutions of the oil industry, investigation of worldwide oil cartel activities was resumed. Much information had been obtained through file searches conducted under grand jury subpoenas in 1940 and 1941. Coincident with this resumption, the Special Committee of the Senate Investigating the National Defense Program, was engaged with public hearings on the same subject. The Chairman of that Committee had requested the Attorney General to look into cartel relationships which were alleged to have caused the United States Navy to pay high prices for petroleum products purchased from American companies doing business in the Middle East. Additional file searches were conducted in 1946 and 1947 and the American oil companies supplied copies of current contracts and other arrangements through 1949.

2. On December 2, 1949, the Federal Trade Commission passed a resolution to investigate “agreements entered into by American petroleum companies among themselves and with petroleum companies of other nations in connection with foreign operations and with international trade in petroleum and petroleum products.” Subpoenas duces tecum were issued in January 1950. In order not to duplicate the investigative work of the Commission, this Department deferred further investigation until the Federal Trade Commission staff filed its report in October 1951. On December 2, 1951 the Select Committees on Small Business of both the House and Senate published a report on The Third World Petroleum Congress by Elmer Patman, appointed to investigate oil cartel activities. Thereupon a study and appraisal of all available material was made. The Attorney General decided that further investigation by grand jury process was necessary and recommended such action to the President who, on June 23, 1952, instructed that proceedings go forward immediately.

3. Early investigative efforts revealed the outline of a world cartel formed as early as 1928 by one American and two foreign oil companies. Over the succeeding years many other American companies joined the cartel. It appears that the uninterrupted extension and continuance of the basic cartel agreements have resulted in a world-wide pattern in which seven of the major oil companies(1) control all major oil producing areas outside the United States; (2) control all foreign refining operations; (3) control patents, know-how and technology covering refining processes; (4) effectively divide world markets; (5) maintain non-competitive world prices for oil and its products; and (6) control foreign pipeline and world tanker transportation facilities.

4. Since petroleum and petroleum products are so essential to national defense, world economic recovery and defense of the free world, it is imperative that petroleum resources be freed from monopoly control by the few and be restored to free competitive private enterprise. Any full scale mobilization would depend more on petroleum products than upon any other commodity.

5. The domestic oil economy of this country is directly involved in and affected by cartel operations. Imports of crude oil into the United States are not free and subject to the natural competitive forces of our economy but are regulated by contracts and agreements between American companies. A cartel program for agreed upon imports is supplanting domestic production and retarding the drilling of new wells to find and earmark proven reserves as an underground stockpile, available for immediate production beyond present actual production. As Secretary Chapman pointed out on November 12, 1952 “We do not begin to have the reserve we should have in order to provide, not absolute security, but just the minimum of security that would give us room to maneuver in the opening months of a war”. Deputy Petroleum Administrator J. Ed Warren publicly stated on October 31, 1952 that our domestic reserve capacity is less than one million barrels per day, which is only 15% of present domestic consumption. In his words—“That’s a percentage much too small for comfort”.

6. In order to maintain the fictitious pricing bases, the American cartel partners engage in uniform collusive bidding when our military seeks to buy petroleum products from them in foreign lands. The Department of National Defense has transmitted this evidence to the Department under the provisions of Title 41, U.S. Code, Section 151(d). The same pricing practices have been engaged in when selling to Mutual Security Agency for European delivery. At least three of the American companies have “over-charged” the MSA approximately 70 million dollars in approximately a 3-year period, on the basis of lower prices they charged on sales “among themselves”. At the request of MSA suits to recover these overcharges have been filed by me. Prices for Middle East oil, delivered to any point in the world, are based on the fiction of American Gulf Coast prices plus delivery costs to a given destination.

7. The international petroleum cartel is a serious threat to our national security. Prompt discovery of its dimensions and effects, and expeditious termination of the cartel and its effects can be accomplished only by pursuing the pending grand jury investigation.

8. Noting that we do not begin to have the domestic petroleum reserve we should possess in order to provide even the minimum of security that would give us room to maneuver in the opening months of a war, the Secretary of the Interior has said that he is not sure how we can go about getting the reserve we must have, and that the present profit incentive alone may prove inadequate to produce the results we must have. This problem exists in the presence of a world cartel whose total operations and total effects are not known but can quickly be ascertained by the grand jury through the subpoena process which it has set in motion to secure the facts.

9. As with petroleum reserves so also with aviation gasoline—we teeter on the edge of a great shortage in the grades the military must have. The prospect is for increasing shortage unless something is done and done quickly, in the words of the Secretary of the Interior. While recognizing industry’s reluctance to build installations for manufacture of the essential alkylate, the Secretary emphasizes that the military need is imperative. This condition, in a period of high productivity and high profitability of company operations, is traceable to the cartel, for the American companies, by working within the cartel, can make more money by investing it abroad than by creating additional domestic facilities. The Paley Commission recently reported that private American investment abroad in the petroleum industry has risen from 1.3 billion dollars in 1940 to 4.1 billion dollars in 1948; and that the ratio of earnings to book value on such direct foreign investments was 27.6% in 1948, whereas the ratio on domestic petroleum investment was only 22.7% in the same year. Here again the condition can be illuminated, and speedily corrected, only by going forward with the grand jury investigation. Any other effort to find the facts and correct them will take so much longer to complete that it will subject the national security to continuing and increasing hazards.

10. Moreover, the cartel constitutes such a complex network of close relationships and joint interests among the major United States and foreign companies as to inevitably identify and entangle the United States with economic and political decisions of foreign governments as to oil. The dangers inherent in this situation ought to be ended in the most expeditious way.

11. The cartel arrangements are in effect private treaties negotiated by private companies to whom the profit incentive is paramount. The national security should rest instead upon decisions made by the Government with primary concern for the national interest. Those private treaties and the other cartel arrangements have already served and can continue to serve as an agreed upon deterrent to development of our domestic resources by the major American companies. This is not to say that importation of petroleum and petroleum products should be discouraged. But the basic noncompetitive principle of a world cartel requires the major domestic producers to agree to give up both normal incentive and freedom to do the major work of enlarging our domestic petroleum resources. As a result, the cartel members, by their control over dominant segments of the domestic industry, regulate and determine the extent to which this nation shall be dependent on foreign supplies which could be cut off in time of war.^*

12. This cartel has existed since 1928, but has been extended and complicated over the years. Its general structure and skeleton are known, but its total outlines and proliferating effects are not known. They could be uncovered by a Congressional Committee but such an investigation could not make any determination as to the legality or illegality of the multiform operations and their effects. In the presence of clear evidence of criminality, as indicated in the staff report of the Federal Trade Commission, the grand jury investigatory method is clearly indicated for two objectives must be achieved: (1) the cartel’s total operations and effects must be brought to light in order that (2) it shall be promptly ended. These combined needs can be met only by grand jury investigation if the public interest in adequate petroleum supplies is not to be hazarded by needless delay.

13. Civil antitrust action is not adequate for the necessities. A civil complaint could be filed but it would have to be very narrowly drawn since only the skeletal facts are available. Similarly, an indictment could have been returned on the basis of the Federal Trade Commission’s staff report and a small number of documents in the possession of the Department of Justice. But in order to do justice to the public interest and to be fair to the companies and their principal officials, it is essential that all of the relevant facts be known and weighed. A civil case, on the basis of experience with comparable activities, would require four to six years to complete. An indictment and trial could be concluded within twelve to fifteen months.

14. Conviction under an indictment will leave correction of the conditions found to be illegal to the companies by renegotiation, while a judgment in a civil case would put responsibility upon a judge to reorient a world industry by decrees acceptable to foreign governments. Correction will be accomplished much more rapidly and smoothly if the companies are obliged to set their houses in order, in view of the nature of the international petroleum industry.

15. The secrecy of a grand jury investigation makes it preferable to an investigation by any other means, such as a Congressional or interdepartmental committee, or a civil antitrust suit. Grand jury investigation will avoid the possibility of public, inflammatory exposures. The pending investigation is being conducted with the aid of a committee composed of representatives of State, CIA, Defense and Justice, specifically concerned with problems of sensitivity and the international repercussions of the inquiry, with provision for submission to the President of questions which cannot be otherwise resolved.

16. The Sherman Act was described by Chief Justice Hughes as our charter of economic freedom. The Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected proof of public benefit and business necessity as justification for cartel operations and has emphasized the primacy of economic freedom as the highest value for our economy. Our concern for an adequate future supply of petroleum is a concern ultimately for the preservation of freedom for ourselves and the free world. Free private enterprise can be preserved only by safeguarding it from excess of power, governmental and private. The selective socialization of business in the ancestral home of our free institutions points to the end result of the cartels which flourished and became the outstanding characteristic of the British economy after Great Britain adopted the Import Duties Act of 1932. The world petroleum cartel is authoritarian, dominating power over a great and vital world industry, in private hands. National security considerations dictate that the most expeditious method be employed to uncover the cartel’s acts and effects and put an end to them. The urgency of these considerations requires that the grand jury investigation go forward even though it might ultimately appear that indictments would not be warranted. The facts presently available strongly suggest that the high policy represented by the Sherman Act has been consciously and persistently violated by activities long since determined by the Supreme Court to be illegal. The cartel should be prosecuted criminally if there is to be equal justice under the law and if respect for the law and its even-handed administration is to be maintained. Far from hurting us abroad, the investigation and prosecution of this cartel’s activities will authenticate our protestations made continuously through the Marshall Plan, ECA, MSA, Point IV and NATO. We cannot promote free private enterprise and productivity abroad unless we are seen to conscientiously enforce our laws designed to preserve them for our own economy and our own domestic and foreign commerce.

1. See footnote 1, Document 279.

2. The industry itself through a January 1949 report of the National Petroleum Council, warned:

   Imports in excess of our economic needs, after taking into account domestic production in conformance with good conservation practices and within the limits of maximum efficient rates of production, will retard domestic exploration and development of new oil fields and the technological progress in all branches of the industry which is essential to the nation’s economic welfare and security.

   Since the date of this warning the pattern of dependence of foreign supplies from sensitive areas of the world has become more deeply imbedded; indeed, by the end of 1950 the excess of imports over exports of petroleum and petroleum products increased by almost 350 percent. [Footnote in the source text.]