Oilgate's Slick Business

For weeks the British press had been warming up, bannering the advance suspicions and denials that attend a grave and imminent scandal. The questions were incessant. Had the government proclaimed a stern law and then winked at its offenders? Who knew about the misdeeds? How much did they know? The affair that Britons were dubbing "Oilgate" threatened to reach into the highest places. At issue was whether ministers of the Crown in the years following Rhodesia's unilateral declaration of independence in 1965 were aware that British Petroleum (BP) and London-based Shell International were helping to supply oil to that outlaw colony in defiance of British statute and U.N. sanctions.

Last week the British government released a 500-page investigative report that seemed to confirm the worst suspicions. Not only has Rhodesia received a steady supply of petroleum products since its secession, but for at least eleven years British subsidiary companies were among the chief suppliers. Worse, Her Majesty's government, at the very time that it was piously trumpeting its sanctions against Rhodesia, had quietly acquiesced in a plan to circumvent them.

The Bingham Report (named after Lawyer Thomas Bingham, appointed to head the investigation 16 months ago by Foreign Secretary David Owen) discloses that the oil sanctions began earnestly enough in the first weeks of furor just after Salisbury, resisting Britain's plans for black majority rule, declared its independence on Nov. 11, 1965. Within days, Parliament enacted the Southern Rhodesia Act, reaffirming Crown rule and authorizing the government to impose a variety of sanctions on the rebel colony. On Dec. 17, 1965, an executive order outlawed the shipment of petroleum and petroleum products to Rhodesia.

With a flamboyant wave of the Union Jack, the Royal Navy was ordered to blockade the Portuguese Mozambican port of Beira, where a new oil pipeline led into Rhodesia. The blockade lasted ten years, but was only window dressing. Shipments to Rhodesia continued to arrive at the old petroleum port of Lourenc,o Marques (now Maputo), several hundred miles to the south. From there the oil was shepherded by Shell Mozambique, a U.K.-incorporated firm, into the hands of South African brokers, who sent it north by rail through Mozambique to Rhodesia.

Mozambique and, much more important, South Africa were the glaring gaps in Britain's purported wall of sanctions against Rhodesia, and the government was not about to plug them. Reason: British investment in South Africa is huge --currently about $10 billion--and trade between the two nations amounts to nearly $3 billion a year.

News gradually reached Britain that oil was still flowing into Rhodesia, and hopes for the success of sanctions gave way to dismay. As Lord Thomson (then Commonwealth Secretary and chairman of an informal Cabinet committee charged with handling the Rhodesia problem) told the Bingham inquiry, "We came increasingly to the conclusion that we couldn't bring the Rhodesian government to an end by sanctions unless we were prepared to apply them to South Africa. We were under no circumstances willing to do that. The best we could make of a bad job was to be in a position to say at least that there was no oil from British companies reaching Rhodesia."

Officials of the oil companies had worked out just such a solution. The French oil group TOTAL would supply Rhodesia through Mozambique, while BP and Shell would service TOTAL'S customers in South Africa. Lord Thomson Insists that he gave a "full account" of these arrangements in writing to Prime Minister Harold Wilson. The former P.M. now acknowledges a report from Thomson, but "not in the terms which have been suggested." Concludes the Bingham Report ambiguously: "The details of the TOTAL agreement were communicated to Her Majesty's government."

Ted Heath's new Tory government, which came to power in 1970, seems to have wanted to know as little as possible about the matter. Lord Home, Foreign Secretary under Heath, explains a bit lamely that the oil sanction issue "was never discussed." The Tories' see-no-evil, hear-no-evil policy apparently helped prompt the oil companies to drop the oil-swapping sham and return to direct shipments through Lourenc,o Marques. Not until a newly independent Mozambican government closed that door in 1976 did the trade stop. Today Rhodesia gets its oil directly from South Africa's supplies.

Prime Minister James Callaghan was deeply embarrassed by the affair. Late last week, with Foreign Secretary David Owen, Callaghan flew off to Nigeria to meet Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda for urgent discussions on the deteriorating situation in southern Africa--and also to convince black Africa that Britain's oily hands were finally clean.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.