Queen of the Oil Club: The Intrepid Wanda Jablonski and the Power of Information (review)

The best journalists are part detectives, part diplomats: tenacious gatherers of information who sometimes serve as go-betweens among sources and can, on occasion, influence history. One such journalist was Wanda Jablonski. Little known today, she covered the oil industry from the 1950s through the 1980s, played midwife to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and started a major business publication, the Petroleum Intelligence Weekly, that became the bible in its field.

Anna Rubino, who worked for Jablonski in the 1980s, has written a book that is far more than a biography. Through the telling of Jablonski’s fascinating life, Rubino has provided a history that puts in context the continuing struggles between oil producers and consumers. Fifty years ago, Jablonski told a conference that Americans “needed to ‘learn to think how the Arabs think, not how we think they should think’” (p. 280). Of the Iranians, she wrote in 1951, after they had nationalized the British company that had taken the lion’s share of their oil earnings: “U.S. diplomats and oil companies ‘would be making a costly mistake if they did not take full account of Iranian sensibilities’” (p. 73).

Born in Slovakia of Polish parents in 1920, Jablonski first learned about oil from her father, a geologist who took the family to Texas, California, New Zealand, and the Middle East. A polyglot product of schools in a half-dozen countries, Jablonski did not let the fact that she was female block a career in a male-dominated field. Applying to university in 1938, she went to Cornell after learning to her astonishment that Harvard, Yale, and Princeton did not admit women. Rejected by the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations, she took a job as a copyboy at the more prosaic Journal of Commerce in New York in 1943. Less than a year later, she had her first byline and soon after, became the paper’s oil writer. “Wanda,” Rubino writes, “was in her element: derricks and yields, sweet and sour crude — this was the language she had learned as a child” (p. 40).

By 1947, after a string of scoops, Jablonski was writing weekly columns under the byline W.M. Jablonski. Journalism was still too sexist to accept a woman writing about something as unfeminine as oil. Jablonski cultivated sources among what were then known as the “Seven Sisters:” the oil giants that monopolized the pumping and selling of oil. She also sought the other side of the story and began to travel to oil-producing countries. She became so knowledgeable that oil executives wanted to interview her, making it easier to get more interviews and more scoops.

Jablonski covered the key oil stories of her day, including Iran’s 1951 nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian oil company. Asked to brief the CIA about Iran in 1954 — after the US-backed coup that overturned Iranian Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadegh — Jablonski was not impressed with her interlocutors. “These men did not know much about oil or the Middle East,” she told a friend (p. 89).

Jablonski’s cultivation of Venezuelan, Iranian, and Saudi oil officials helped change history. In 1959, then working for Petroleum Week, she covered the first Arab Petroleum Congress in Cairo and introduced Saudi Arabia’s Oil Minister, ‘Abdullah Tariki, to his Venezuelan counterpart, Juan Pablo Perez Alfonso, a man who had wrested a 50-50 profit split from the oil majors a few years earlier. Perez Alfonso, Tariki, Manucher Farmanfarmaian — an Iranian oil official Jablonski had first met in 1951 — and delegates from Kuwait, Egypt, and Iraq then met for dinner in the Cairo suburb of Maadi. The “Gentlemen’s Agreement” they signed urged producing nations to establish “a formal consultation commission as a way to defend against arbitrary decisions by the oil companies and improve concession terms for the oil-producing...