Follow The Pipelines

Part personal pilgrimage, part deft critique, Dennetts insightful reportage examines what happens to international relations when oil wealth hangs in the balance, and she shines a glaring light on what so many have actually been dying for. In 1947, Daniel Dennett, Americas sole master spy in the Middle East, was dispatched to Saudi Arabia to study the route of the proposed Trans-Arabian Pipeline. It would be his last assignment. A plane carrying him to Ethiopia went down, killing everyone onboard. Today, Dennett is recognised by the CIA as a Fallen Star and an important figure in US intelligence history. Yet the true cause of his death remains clouded in secrecy. In Follow the Pipelines, investigative journalist Charlotte Dennett digs into her fathers postwar counterintelligence work, which pitted him against Americas wartime allies the British, French and Russians in a covert battle for geopolitical and economic influence in the Middle East. Through stories and maps, she reveals how feverish competition among superpower intelligence networks, military and Big Oil interests have fueled indiscriminate attacks, misguided foreign policy and targeted killings that continue to this day. Charlotte Dennett delivers an irrefutable indictment of these devastating external forces and demonstrates how decades of brutal violence have shaped the Middle East and birthed an era of endless conflict all for oil.