Word: caspian
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Albright and her senior State Department colleagues sat down for a full-dress CIA briefing on the Caspian last August. The agency had set up a secret task force to monitor the region's politics and gauge its wealth. Covert CIA officers, some well-trained petroleum engineers, had traveled through southern Russia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan to sniff out potential oil reserves. When the policymakers heard the agency's report, Albright concluded that working to mold the area's future was "one of the most exciting things that...
American officials frown when outsiders call the battle over the Caspian another "Great Game," the term Rudyard Kipling used for the 19th century struggle for influence and control between the British and Russian empires. But another Great Game is what it is. Washington wants Caspian oil to flow through many pipelines so that no single country can bottle it up, and is adamantly against having a new pipeline pass through Iran. It is fine if some of the lines run through Russia, as they already do, but Russia should not be able to turn a valve and shut...
Specifically, the U.S. wants the big new carrier, the one the oilmen call the main export pipeline, to run westward from the Caspian to the Turkish port of Ceyhan, on the Mediterranean, because Turkey is a NATO ally. The U.S. does not entirely trust Russia, which resents the arrival of foreign influence in what were Soviet republics. To Washington, the Islamist regime in Iran looks even less friendly. "The last thing we need," says a White House aide, "is to rely on the Persian Gulf as the main access for more...
...pipeline southward through Iran would be the shortest way to go. "This is all ridiculous," says Hossein Kazempour Ardebili, an adviser to the ministers of petroleum and foreign affairs in Tehran, as he draws a map of proposed routes through Russia and Turkey. "We have our hands in the Caspian Sea and our feet in the Persian Gulf, the simplest outlet for this energy...
...common lake between the two countries. Tehran is willing to negotiate a new agreement but demands veto rights over any aspect it doesn't like. If Iran's interests are not taken into account, says Ardebili, it will deal with what it considers illegal activities in the Caspian by using "constructive--and possibly destructive" countermeasures...