Had a buddy who worked for a senior vice president of Enron, he told me that Maddy Albright said exactly the same thing to them in a meeting around 1997. With specific reference to South America but they also had their sights set on Asia-Pacific, North America, Western Europe…
I remember they were working with a French company called "Saur" on this.
… didn't think of it at the time, but 'saur' kind of sounds like 'dinosaur' or 'saurian', don't it?
HOW A DEEP STATE PLOT SANK JIMMY CARTER
In “American Deep State,” Scott takes a compelling look at the facts lurking behind the official histories of events to uncover the real dynamics in play. In this exclusive excerpt—the second of several we’ll be featuring on WhoWhatWhy—Scott narrates how manipulations by Big Oil and a shadowy alliance of national intelligence agencies called the Safari Club helped Ronald Reagan defeat President Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election.
After Carter was elected, the Safari Club allied itself with Richard Helms and Theodore Shackley against the more restrained intelligence policies of Jimmy Carter, according to Joseph Trento. In Trento’s account, the dismissal by William Colby in 1974 of CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton,
combined with Watergate, is what prompted the Safari Club to start working with [former DCI Richard] Helms [then U.S. Ambassador to Iran] and his most trusted operatives outside of Congressional and even Agency purview. James Angleton said before his death that “Shackley and Helms … began working with outsiders like Adham and Saudi Arabia. The traditional CIA answering to the president was an empty vessel having little more than technical capability.”(2)
Shackley, who still had ambitions to become DCI, believed that without his many sources and operatives like [Edwin] Wilson, the Safari Club—operating with [former DCI Richard] Helms in charge in Tehran—would be ineffective. . . . Unless Shackley took direct action to complete the privatization of intelligence operations soon, the Safari Club would not have a conduit to [CIA] resources. The solution: create a totally private intelligence network using CIA assets until President Carter could be replaced. (4)
1During the 1980 election campaign each party accused the other of plotting an October Surprise to elect their candidate. Subsequently other journalists, notably Robert Parry, accused CIA veterans on the Reagan campaign, along with Shackley, of an arguably treasonable but successful plot with Iranians to delay return of the U.S. hostages until Reagan took office in January 1981. (5)
According to Parry, Alexandre de Marenches of the Safari Club arranged for William Casey (a fellow Knight of Malta) to meet with Iranian and Israeli representatives in Paris in July and October 1980, where Casey promised delivery to Iran of needed U.S. armaments in exchange for a delay in the return of the U.S. hostages in Iran. (6) Parry also suspects a role of BCCI in the subsequent flow of Israeli armaments to Iran.
A more usual explanation for Carter’s defeat in 1980 was the second oil shock of 1979–1980, in which an acute gas shortage led to both a sudden increase in prices and long gas lines at service stations. It is customary for establishment scholars to blame the shortage on political upheavals in Iran, which led to “a cutoff of Iranian oil.”(8)
2However Robert Sherrill’s close analysis of the American oil industry demonstrates that American oil companies, not Iranian turmoil, were primarily responsible for the gas shortage:
U.S. companies were up to their own strategy . . . . Although in fact America was importing more oil in January and February [1979], during the Iranian shutdown, than it had imported during the same period in 1978, major oil importers pretended that the Iranian “shortage” . . . was real. It was the excuse they gave for slashing the amount of gasoline they supplied to their retail dealers. . . . A CIA study showed that in the first five months of the year, at a time when the Administration was deploring our oil shortage, U.S. companies exported more oil than they had in those glut years 1977 and 1978.(9)
The oil majors’ manipulation of domestic oil prices, combined with Carter’s failure to bring the hostages home, combined to cause the first defeat for an elected president running for reelection, since that of Herbert Hoover in 1932.
Not mentioned by either mainstream journalists or Sherrill was the role quietly played by Saudi Arabia in augmenting the 1979 gas crisis: “The Saudis had cut production by nearly 1 million barrels a day to 9.5 million at the start of the year [1979], and in April 1979 they made a second cut to 8.5 million. The Saudis had the capacity to produce 12 million barrels a day at that point.”(10)
sauce: https://whowhatwhy.org/2014/11/02/the-deep-state-plots-the-1980-defeat-of-jimmy-carter/