0PEC, which stands for the organization
of petroleum Exporting Countries, is a four-letter word
synonymous with prodigious wealth, arbitrary power, and
fear. The wealth is from the combined oil sales of its thirteen
member nations, which exceeded $240 billion in 1981, a sum
greater than half of the entire M-1 money supply in the
United States; the power from the fact that its members
control nearly two thirds of the free world's oil reserves;
and the fear from the threat that OPEC might cut off this
lifeline of energy, paralyzing the world's economy. No other
organization, with the possible exception of the first Communist
Internationale, has excited such concerns on a global scale.
The continued preoccupation with the
potential threat of OPEC, however, distracted attention
from the actual flesh-and-blood organization that inspired
it. Despite a booming voice that has reverberated through
the world's media for the past decade, it turns out that
OPEC is a small organization. Its headquarters, in Vienna,
is its only office: there are no branches or representatives
elsewhere. Except for the alert squad of Austrian "Cobra"
commando-, with submachine guns guarding the entranceway,
the four-story building at Donaustrasse 93 in downtown Vienna
resembles any other modern office building in Europe. It
is built of gray marble, and glass, With a small parking
lot in front, and almost identical buildings on either side,
housing IBM and an Austrian hank. In 1982, twenty-two years
after it was founded, 0PEC employed only thirty-nine persons
on is executive staff. Not counting a few dozen Austrian
secretaries and clerks and a handful of employees of OPEC's
Fund for International Development (which awards grants
and other largesse to countries in the Third World), this
staff of thirty-nine men constitute the entire worldwide
employment of OPEC. It included everyone from the secretary
general to the press officers.
Last September, I was taken through
the headquarters. The most prominent part of OPEC is the
huge press auditorium on the ground floor, which is more
than twice the size of its counterpart in the White House.
It is surrounded by; state-of-the-art communications facilities
for the press, on which no expense has been spared: a fully
equipped color-television studio for taping interviews with
OPEC spokesmen, telephones and Telexes for reporters' use
in dispatching stories, a multilith printing press for churning
out press releases, and a library of energy publications.
There is even an in-house wire service, called OPECNA, which
feeds announcements and other news releases to subscribing
newspapers and radio stations. Aside from these services
to reporters, OPEC edits a number of glossy publications-including
a monthly OPEC bulletin, the annual report, and illustrated
briefing books. Behind the auditorium, through a locked
door, is the computer room, which contains the institutional
memory of OPEC. The computer itself is a medium-size IBM
4341, installed in 1980 and programmed by a group of American
consultants from the University of Southern California in
Los Angeles. The air-conditioned room is crammed with metallic
cabinets storing the hard disks of computer memory. In the
center is a control console manned by a Viennese operator.
When he initially attempted to demonstrate to me the computer.-
graphic abilities, the screen. after an embarrassingly long
hesitation, came up blank. "This is of course not the top-of-the-line
IBM," he said apologetically, re-entering the instructions
on the keyboard. This time, the computer drew out a multicolored
graph of prices for different grades of crude oil. The data
was eight years old.
The operator explained that the computer
has no direct telecommunication links to the oil markets
and loading facilities. Instead, the data on prices comes
by mail from Platt's Oilgram Price Report, an oil-industry
newsletter published in Houston and New York. Each day,
the prices published in Platt's have to be entered into
the OPEC computer. Since there are only two programmers
at OPEC, the information in the computer is often outdated.
When it came to displaying oil production
from individual OPEC countries, the computer was out of
date by the end of the month.-. "The problem is political,"
the operator explained: the OPEC countries refuse to provide
the Vienna headquarters with data on how much oil they are
producing and shipping. While some members, such as Indonesia,
Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia, do furnish some data-after
a delay of from two to six months-other members, such as
Libya, Iran, and Nigeria, refuse to supply any figures at
all on production and oil shipments. The result is that
OPEC relies for much of its information about oil production
on the International Energy Agency, in Paris, which was
formed in 1974 by sixteen industrial nations, led by the
United States, to ration the remaining supply of oil in
the event of a dreaded OPEC cutoff. The IEA, in turn, relies
mainly on the data of the United State Department of Energy,
which, to complete the circle, draws its data from the reporting
of the major oil companies. The picture of the oil market
whirled out in four colors by the OPEC computer is thus
not the product of the daily reality of oil loadings in
the Persian Gulf or other ports of OPEC countries but the
product of outdated statistics from oil companies which
have been filtered through government bureaucracies.
When we left the computer room, Dr. Edward
Omotoso, OPECs head of communications, wistfully acknowledged
that the data base was "not perfect." He explained, "OPEC
is not the CIA. We do not have satellites in the skies to
count every oil tanker. We are not really that sort of an
organization." He added, "We are not even a wealthy organization."
The annual budget for OPEC, like the
size of the staff, seems far more appropriate for a small
business than for what the press has often called the "most
powerful group on earth." In 1981, the allocated budget
was about $13.4 million (not all of it spent), most of which
went for the cost of publishing OPEC's bulletin, books,
and annual report. Saudi Arabia's share, for example (equal
to that of the other members), was $906,250 in 1981, equivalent
to the revenue it earned in about four minutes from its
oil fields. "We have to watch even the cost of our long-distance
telephone calls," an Iranian finance officer in OPEC said,
referring to the infrequent communications with the oil
producing centers.
"No one considers the OPEC assignment
a plum," an OPEC executive explained. Although some employees
see in OPEC a chance to escape authoritarian regimes and
seek opportunities in the West, a job at OPEC is usually
a detour from the path of advancement at a national oil
company. And as it turns out, many OPEC technocrats (to
not return to jobs in their home countries; they frequently
go on to be oil consultants in Geneva or Paris. A number
of OPEC executives were openly dissatisfied with the chaotic
and unpredictable working conditions. "There are a number
of vacancies on the staff," Dr. Omotoso said, as he reviewed
the roster.
The position of secretary general, which
rotates among the thirteen member nations every two years,
is currently held by Dr. Marc Nan Nguema, a Gabonese civil
servant. Dr. Nguema spends a considerable part of his time
representing OPEC at energy seminars, conferences, and other
ceremonial occasions. His Office of the Secretary consists
of an assistant and a speech writer. (In December, the OPEC
ministers voted against extending the term of Dr. Nguema
after he was severely criticized by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait,
and the United Arab Emirates for exceeding his expense account
and travel allowance.) The de facto head of OPEC is the
deputy secretary general, Dr. Fadhil J. At Chalabi, a fifty-three-year-old
Iraqi lawyer and former minister who before joining OPEC,
in 1978, ran OAPEC, a completely different group composed
entirely of Arab oil producers. Directly under Dr. Al-Chalabi
is the Division of Research, headed by another Iraqi, which
employs more than half the staff. Its job is to gather and
analyze data :about the international oil trade. The other
major job of OPEC, also under Chalabi's control, is image-making.
The products of its international PR machine, according
to OPEC's last annual report, include the commissioning
of a book on the history of OPEC,.entitled OPEC: An Instrument
of Change; films with titles such as For the Benefit of
All; subsidized OPEC Workshops for Journalists of the Third
World, designed to "counteract misinterpretations and distortions
in the media of OPEC's aims"; a commemorative OPEC postage
stamp; and the daily release of "news" through the OPEC
wire service. These activities aim at reversing the "brainwashing"
of the media in the West.
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