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Rusting and broken pipelines and stretches of barbed wire litter the sand around the deserted town of Ras Sudr, once a dusty bedroom community for Egyptian and foreign workers at the nearby oilfields. The wells of Ras Sudr produce only 3,000 bbl. of crude a day−a trickle by Middle Eastern standards and only a fraction of the 75,000 bbl. daily pumped out of Abu Rudeis. But the desolate, cactus-covered patch of desert with its huddle of workers' decaying cottages has a considerable symbolic importance. Under the second Sinai accord worked out last summer...
...Israeli pullout, Egypt formally took possession again. Within hours a tanker had been loaded and was under way with a cargo of the first oil from the lost fields of the Sinai to head for Suez in eight years. TIME'S Cairo Bureau Chief Wilton Wynn was at Ras Sudr when the oil to Egypt started flowing. His report...
Even as the Sadats were packing their bags, tensions continued in the Middle East. At U.N. Post 512 in the Sinai, a joint Israeli-Egyptian commission held its first meeting to work out details of the Israeli withdrawal from an area including the Ras Sudr oilfields; that move is now scheduled to be completed by mid-November. Almost simultaneously, Syrian and Israeli troops clashed on the Golan Heights. It was the first such incident since the Syrian-Israeli disengagement in May 1974. The Syrian strategy seemed clearly designed to discredit Sadat in the Arab world...
...Egyptian representatives who showed up to reclaim the fields were not Egyptians but three cigar-chomping Texans who work for Mobil Oil; the corporation owns 50% of the Egyptian company that had operated the fields before Israel captured them during the Six-Day War. The Israelis in charge of Ras Sudr insisted that the Texans had to sign for the Arab Republic of Egypt. Well, no, said Engineering Consultant Billy Marcum of Dallas; he and his buddies were empowered to sign only for Mobil. Israeli Representative Meir Gueron replied that the Jewish Sabbath would begin soon. Unless Marcum agreed...
Israel, meanwhile, was acting with equivalent aplomb. Even though Jerusalem did not sign the agreement until last week, the government had earlier decided to honor a timetable drawn up as though it had. Thus the Mobil engineers were welcomed heartily when they first arrived at Ras Sudr under U.N. escort, a day before the signing ceremony. An Israeli colonel in charge of the pullback from the fields told TIME Correspondent Marlin Levin: "We will leave the oilfields to the Egyptians just as we found them. We have even cleaned up the mosque for them...