Here is the tale of what the U.S. State Department once called "the most valuable commercial prize in the history of the planet," the vast oil reserves beneath the sands of the Arabian desert. Using Aramco files never before available to scholars or journalists, dozens of personal interviews and U.S., British, and Saudi Arabian documents, Anthony Cave Brown recounts the unceasing diplomatic and corporate maneuvers aimed at obtaining - and then exploiting this unimaginable wealth.

The ongoing drama involved such figures as the great Warrior-king Ibn Saud, founder of the Saudi dynasty; H St John Philby, the British scholar-adventurer who was a chief adviser to the king; the American philanthropist Charles Crane; Winston Churchill; Franklin Delano Roosevelt; the shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis; and oil industry executives such as Floyd Ohliger, Fred Davies and Frank Jungers, whose toughness and energy reflected the best in the great tradition of American industrial capitalism.

Played out against a background of war and the turmoil of an ancient culture thrust abruptly into the twentieth century, the struggle to control the flow of Saudi oil was won by the United States, which emerged as the dominant Western power in the Middle East.