Whodunit

So deep has been the mystery sur rounding U.S. Government politicking in the strategic oil regions of the world that no one could even tell whether a murder had been committed, let alone whodunit.

The Body Is Found. Last June, just before RFC's authority to set up Government corporations expired, Jesse Jones created the Petroleum Reserve Corp. and empowered it to engage in enough world wide oil activities to make any private oil company look puny. Then Banker Jesse uncharacteristically began to ignore PRC.

Not until August did any reporter even dig up PRC's board of directors : Oil Czar Ickes, the Secretaries of War, Navy, and State, and Foreign Economic Administrator Leo Crowley. But at that time, although Ickes was President, PRC's charter was amended to give Crowley authority even to dissolve the Corporation.

Last month, after numerous hush-hush trips by special emissaries, PRC officially sent a full-fledged geological mission to the British-dominated Middle East -- an area which Harold Ickes rightly described as the coming "capital of the oil empire" (TIME, Dec. 27, 1943).

The Plot Thickens. Last week the plot thickened some more -- and got a new hero. The National Petroleum News front paged a sensational charge, from "responsible members of Congress," that the real power behind PRC was Franklin D. Roosevelt's -- and Britain's -- great & good friend, Harry Hopkins. Ickes, said the News, was powerless even to carry out any policies, let alone formulate them.

It further reported that FEA's general counsel Oscar Cox was Harry Hopkins' pipeline to PRC. But it concluded that PRC "has been reduced to a rare level of impotency"; i.e., there has been so much scrapping over who is to command any U.S. attack on world oil that no one has had a chance to launch one.

Trade gossip had it that one big reason Honest Harold lost out in PRC was because he had been asking the British too many questions about their vast oil reserves in the Middle East. Still another eye-popping Petroleum News report was that Franklin Roosevelt himself had thought of demanding a half interest for the U.S. in Britain's Anglo-Iranian Oil Co., Ltd. as a quid pro quo for lend-leased U.S. oil, but had backed down before Teheran.

The Senate Sleuths. The ink had barely dried on the News's front page when two Republican Senators (Maine's Brewster, Oklahoma's Moore) stepped into the plot with a resolution to liquidate PRC. If the Administration wants to save its mysterious enterprise, it may soon have to tell Congress what it is up to.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.