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Born in Voss, Norway, in 1882, this strapping young Viking became an American citizen at the
age of twenty-two. Within weeks, he was master of an oil tanker loading up from Spindletop,
Texas. He joined the Texas Company at twenty-three; within twenty years he was chairman;
he created a tanker fleet that gave his company enormous international power by 1933. He
built the Barco pipeline in Colombia, flying suspension bridges in sections from Texas to the
Andes, flinging them across 5,000-foot passes. He linked up with Standard Oil of California in
Saudi Arbia and in Bahrein in the Persian Gulf, obtaining a monopoly through under-the-table
deals with the local rulers and the Japanese and German interests in those areas.
"Cap" Rieber supplied Franco in the Spanish Civil War, shipping oil from Galveston to
Bordeaux in France and thence to Corunna, with orders not to stop for inspection by any man-
of-war, including United States gunships. He supplied polymerization techniques to I.G. Farben
in the Ruhr and to I.G.-Farben-connected companies in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Syria
with the approval of the State Department.
In December 1939 he flew with Goring in a plane piloted by Pan American Airways pilot Pete
Clausen on a personally conducted tour of the main centers of industrial Germany. He sailed
his vessels through the British blockade to fuel the U-boats after 1939, and simultaneously
sent more to aid Nazi corporations in South America. He told Life magazine in 1940, "If the
Germans ever catch [any of my ships] carrying oil to the Allies they will have my hearty
permission to fire a torpedo into her."
Rieber was among those, like Davis, who had high hopes for Juan Almazan's bid for the
Mexican presidency to succeed in favor of the Axis. On February 12, 1940, the American
Embassy in Mexico City reported that Texas Oil of Arizona was working in close collusion with
affiliated oil groups including the Davis Oil Company in directing the clandestine entry of arms
into Mexico. The arms were to support a possible military coup by Almazan in the event of his
defeat at the polls. The report said, "Pacific Fruit Express refrigerator cars are each loaded
with arms in special wooden boxes so shaped as to fit very conveniently along the sides of the
wooden strips or slotted flooring that permits the drainage of the ice water to the drain pipes
under the floor of these cars." The report added, "Oil company secret service operatives are
ridiculing the Mexican Government for the glass-eyed vigilance on the border, as they call it,
that enables them to execute adroit introduction of arms without detection." The report said, "I
find that large sums of oil money are being paid out on the border for protection and I also
have ascertained that Custom House officials on the American side of the line at Eagle Pass,
Texas, have accepted money to facilitate the departure of arms from the U.S.A. through this
American port of entry."
In 1940, Rieber worked in close collaboration with the Texas Company's German
representative Nikolaus Bensmamn, who was a paid spy of Hermann Schmitz's nephew Max
Ilgner in Bremen. Bensmann corresponded with Rieber and Rieber's vice-president, R. J.
Dearborn, in a complicated cipher that was successfully designed to evade the British
censorship office in Bermuda. The cipher was so effective that, as Bensmann wrote to the
Abwehr in Hamburg on January 29, 1940, "Even lengthy espionage reports can be transmitted
without running the risk of discovery." By the code, Rieber was able to send information to
Bensmann about gasoline shipments to the Canary Islands and secret patents being shipped
clandestinely to Berlin. These reports made their way to I.G. Farben's N.W.7. Intelligence
Group, where they were examined by Ilgner. Rieber visited Roosevelt to discuss the
President's attitude toward Germany; intelligence on the meetings was transferred by
Bensmann's code to Berlin. Rieber's reports on every aspect of the petroleum industry in the
United States rivaled those supplied by General Aniline and Film. Even restricted aircraft-
production details were given, in a fifty-eight-page report that should never have left America,
prepared with the cooperation of spies in the offices of Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes
and Secretary of the Navy James V. Forrestal. The cipher was never broken. But here is a
problem. Why were these ciphers allowed to flow through Bermuda? Why were they not
stopped? There is no evidence they were forwarded to London for examination.
Rieber obtained British Navicerts or certificates of authorization to send his supplies to
Germany through the British blockade after Britain and Germany were at war. He bartered the
shipments for nine tankers built for him in Nazi yards and delivered to him under the
Norwegian flag with British consent after September 3, 1939. In 1940, Rieber sold all German
interests in Texas Company's German patents for $5 million. He arranged contracts with I.G.
Farben in which he supplied plans of all the motors and installations of American Navy yards
and Army forts that he provided with gasoline and oil.
Some of Rieber's employees were loyal Americans. They wrote to the State Department and
even the President demanding that Rieber be exposed. They alleged that he hired Gestapo
agents as lubrication engineers and that emissaries of the German military authority in
Norway were staying with Rieber in New York. On August 2, 1940, an employee of Rieber's
Beacon Research Laboratory wrote the State Department that Rieber was "a representative of
Hitler in this country." The employee added that "the entire executive staff of the Texas Co. is [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]