CIB

From a Meeting Outside Port Lucaya to a Standoff Outside Baku

 

Date: 1/27/2021
Author: Kent Moors, Ph.D.


This offering in the Classified Intelligence Brief  “Spy Tales” series is proof that my life could start a process in one part of the world obliging action someplace else. The tale begins in the Caribbean and ends in the Caspian. It also comes from the period toward the end of my heavy active status in the intel business.

You see, upon reaching a certain age, one is finally able to use the immortal Danny Glover line from the Lethal Weapons movies and tell higher pay grades that “I am too old for this sh*t.” Shazam, I became a consultant subject to recall!   

This week is also a good time for this particular story for two reasons. First, I am in detailed conversations with “mother” over expanding what tales I can tell (to include less successful episodes, those involving some high-profile situations, and my still largely classified stints in Vietnam and other hot spots). I have a feeling this will be like pulling teeth with any openings coming very incrementally.

Thus far, the tales in the series have been able to provide some of the flavor. I still hope to be able to add a bit more substance.

The present story, however, does not trip any alarms for the censor. And so, while the negotiations continue, I decided to move it up the line and send it out earlier than expected. Unfortunately, these negotiations apparently do not yet include movie rights.

Second, we have just passed the yearly anniversary of the initial events to be described.

So, here goes. Once again, some background first.

For almost twenty-five years, Marina and I owned ocean front property on Grand Bahama Island. This northern island in the Bahamas chain is a long, narrow piece of land with West End sitting a sixty-seven-mile boat trip from West Palm Beach, FL. There was also a car ferry service at the time, but you needed to stop off in Bimini first making it an all-day trip. It was also quite expensive and difficult to obtain a temporary auto registration on Grand Bahama.

Our house was down the beach from Lucaya, named for the original indigenous Indians of the islands. Port Lucaya became a deep-water stopping off point for yachts and other large vessels thanks to Bell Channel (below) cutting a direct access to the Atlantic Ocean.

The marina – along with Count Basie Square and the restaurants and bars surrounding it – became a favorite haunt of the rich and famous.

In short, it was a perfect place to make it difficult for people to find me. I would unwind on the porch, drink Kalik (the very good local beer), and gaze out on this “front yard:”

Now all beaches in the Bahamas are public. However, because Bell Channel cut off our property from the roads on that side of the island, the only way to reach us was by private boat from the sea, a water taxi from the inland side, or trekking all the way down the beach. Suited me just fine.

I ended up writing two books there, caught up on a lot of sleep, and toasted many sunsets.

We became fixtures among the locals, laughing at weddings, crying at funerals, and providing babysitting services as an honorary uncle and aunt to a widening number of children. Family networks are quite large, complex, and sometimes ad hoc in the islands.

One New Year’s week, we invited some local friends over for a party on the beach. That turned into an annual affair that probably attracted half of Port Lucaya and morphed into a three-day (at least “officially”) gathering. We opened the house, ordered a large amount of food and beer, dug out a beach pit near the porch for an ongoing barbecue, and went at it. People would wander in, leave for their homes, and come back a day or so later. We would still be there along with a fair part of the town. For those who could not make it home, there was always a nice powder beach  on which to sleep it off.

After doing this for several years, I started inviting guests from other parts of the world. Our house was a good location for meetings that could not be easily handled on the mainland. Some participants would have visa problems entering the US. While such meetings were held at various times of the year, the annual party became a preference. It is here, over a few New Year’s, that I brokered some of my first big international energy deals while segueing from academe and government service into the world of high-powered advising.

We would meet in the living room while everybody else was carrying on outside the front door.  It is during one of these sessions that the following events started.

It was not like I had no clue what was coming. One day just before Christmas I watched as two guys dressed in suits and carrying their shoes slowly made their way up the beach. There goes the neighborhood, I said to myself.

We were a little more than a week from the annual bash and Mutt and Jeff show up (in case you had any doubt, those were not their real names; but they did look like they had just walked off a comic strip, so…).

I knew “Jeff’ and “Mutt” seemed like his new division chief. We sat on the porch and passed around the Kalik. It was required that any of my foreign business meetings be “screened” by Langley. It quickly was apparent that this time around somebody on the guest list had triggered bells back at HQ.

I may have been in that nether world between active service and “occasional consultant” but my life was never completely my own. Decades earlier I had signed a piece of paper that sort of said “We understand your soul belongs to god. But the rest is ours until further notice.”

During my meetings to occur over the next weekend (and in the middle of the upcoming annual get together), one of the main subjects was a funding package for an oil feeder pipeline project. These are the lines that collect production from a number of well locations and shepherd the crude to larger trunk lines for transport.

In this case, the funding was needed by SOCAR, the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan, to connect wells north of the capital city of Baku to a huge BP-led international pipeline moving oil to the major export port at Ceyhan on the Turkish Mediterranean coast close by Cyprus.

Given the ongoing hostilities between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the region of Nagorno-Karabagh, an internecine war that continues to this day, the pipeline was moved northwest to the capital of Georgia and then southwest to the Turkish coast, bypassing Armenia entirely.

Thus, the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline was born.

The land-locked Caspian contains significant hydrocarbon resources. The problem has been  moving it out to international markets. Traditionally, the bulk during the Soviet period went north across Russia, to the massive oil port at Novorossiysk on the Black Sea, then through the Bosporus to the world. Those routes made sense when Azerbaijan was an internal republic of the USSR. But Washington was looking for that to end.

BTC would satisfy that objective, allowing a now independent Azerbaijan a way to move its oil to global end users without having to throughput it across Russia. That Moscow was also supporting Armenia in the ongoing Nagorno-Karabagh conflict strengthened the US position in Baku.

With support for a range of BTC issues rapidly materializing among American financing sources, owing in no small measure to the help provided by Washington, SOCAR would get its money.

My only assignment from the comic strip guys during the “beach bash” sessions was to assure that SOCAR would provide access to our security concerns on the BTC. The agency wanted an ability to “patrol” what was certain to be a prime target for all manner of insurgents, Russian agents, and Iranian, Iraqi, Syrian, and other interests. There would be plenty of spots to offer cover for our officers and agents in the penumbra of activities surrounding such a massive pipeline project.

Agreements were made to parallel bilateral and multilateral accords being reached through other channels on both finance and security. I returned to finishing up negotiations on matters in the inside meetings while outside seeing to it that no party goers were washed out to sea.

And that seemed to be the end of the matter. Until some four months later.

Now state side, I received a panicked phone call from a banker in London whose house was coordinating BTC loan lines. My name had been graciously forwarded to him (by guess who) as the “trouble shooter” on the project.

Seems Azeri farmers were up in arms and had brought pipeline construction outside Baku to a standstill. They were boycotting the work zones and preventing crews from passing. The banker said, “We were told you could help here,” adding that each day of lost work was ballooning project costs. He also seemed to be intimating that the money sources had rising concerns about SOCAR and the Azerbaijani government. They needed somebody with connections who could do a job free-lance.

So off I went to Baku.

I have been there on several occasions. Heyday Aliyev International Airport is a sparkling modern facility, recently connected to downtown by an expressway. But it is also one of the few airports in the world where you first must go through passport control and then reverse yourself, go back to the entry lounge, and wait in a separate line to process an entry visa complete with taking yet another photo. At that point, you then go through passport control a second time, now with a visa in hand.

Virtually all the other folks in line on each of my trips were foreign company oil workers. Several would usually roll off the overnight flights smashed. That usually meant several of those more responsible would hold them upright while the drunken specialists tried to sign forms and take pictures.

I checked in at the Commerce Office at the US Embassy (since this was overtly a commercial project) on the second floor of the embassy. That was followed by a meeting with the agency Chief of Station (COS) in the secure corner of the third floor.

US Embassy, 111 Azadliq Ave, Baku

It now takes more time to enter the embassy compound after building security has been enhanced.

Nobody had any genuine idea why the impasse had transpired or what had ticked off the farmers. The COS assessment concluded that it was not political or inspired by any serous insurgency incident. The famers had been paid rather handsomely to allow pipeline access across their land and had further been provided with funds for various local upgrades. No reason for them to be suddenly upset, ran the “official” view.

I met with the two SOCAR representatives who had attended the “party” four months earlier and some of their colleagues at their older facility downtown.

Earlier SOCAR Headquarters

In 2010, well after the incident discussed in this tale, SOCAR move to this spectacular address, the SOCAR Tower on Heydar Aliyev Avenue:

The SOCAR officials in my conversations were embarrassed, although how much of that was genuine and how much just for show in the presence of an American was debatable. I decided to take a young Azeri local asset and go up to the center of the controversy, a small village outside Gobustan, northwest of Baku.

FYI: Gobustan is the site of famous rock drawings and mud volcanoes, considered a cultural landmark and now housed in a national park.

The village in question, Jangi, is further northwest and is part of the Nabur municipality. There are far less than 1,000 people living there. But they can certainly bring a major multibillion dollar project to a halt.

The farmers were camped out to impede equipment from moving along the pipeline route. All work had been suspended and I saw no BTC personnel or BP management on site. BP, the UK international oil major, oversaw most of the pipeline construction and had been the leading partner of SOCAR since independence.

I decided to meet with representatives of the farmers. Here is one of the few photos ever released of my work on any assignment (by a UN team there helping the farmers, certainly not by our folks). My local asset is second from the left. He also served as translator.

Leave it to the Brits. They did not have a local involved when finalizing the agreement and it came back to bite them. Lawyers in London usually cannot read what is happening on the ground.

As is standard practice, the BP holding company controlling BTC acquired an exclusive right of way fifty feet on either side of the pipeline (which in this location is above ground on stilts).

BTC west of Nabur

The farmers were paid better than market for the land. However, the BP managers had neglected one especially salient further factor.

The farmers now lived on one side of the pipeline while their fields were on the other side. The agreement cut off the farmers’ access to their livelihoods because now they could not cross the BTC exclusively controlled right of way to tend their crops.

Once the problem was correctly understood, it was easily resolved. SOCAR quickly organized an EDZ (economic development zone) for Nabur and environs, while raising the pipeline at two  locations separated by about 1,500 meters so that the farmers could cross beneath the pipeline (and across the right of way).

It also would spawn a new local industry as enterprising businesses emerged to sell fruit, drinks, and food to those passing beneath the BTC.

Sometimes just knowing the real situation on site can avoid major problems. Especially with an adventure that began on a Bahamian island and ended in the foothills of the Azerbaijani Caucuses.

Dr. Kent Moors

 


This is an installment of Classified Intelligence Brief, your guide to what’s really happening behind the headlines… and how to profit from it.

Dr. Kent Moors served the United States for 30 years as one of the most highly decorated intelligence operatives alive today (including THREE Presidential commendations). After moving through the inner circles of royalty, oligarchs, billionaires, and the uber-rich, he discovered some of the most important secrets regarding finance, geo-politics, and business. As a result, he built one of the most impressive rolodexes in the world. His insights and network of contacts took him from a Vietnam veteran to becoming one of the globe’s most sought after consultants, with clients including six of the largest energy companies and the United States government.

Now, Dr. Moors is sharing his proprietary research every week… knowledge filtered through his decades as an internationally recognized professor and scholar, intelligence operative, business consultant, investor, and geo-political “troubleshooter.”

This publication is designed to give you an insider’s view of what is really happening on the geo-political stage. You can sign up for FREE to Classified Intelligence Brief and begin receiving insights from Dr. Moors and his team immediately.

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