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But soon, as production picks up, that line and a number of others already laid will be too small to handle the job. The consortiums want a new 3.5-ft.-wide line that will be able to carry up to 1 million bbl. a day in five years. At the bar of the Ragin' Cajun, a hot spot in Baku, a veteran of oil fields from Texas to Siberia explains, "The game's called pipeline poker. The Caspian is crazy. It's landlocked. We can drill all the oil you'd ever need. But can we get it out?"
It's a question that has ignited a tense struggle in the region and beyond. The coastal states of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan gained their independence when the Soviet empire collapsed. All three want to exploit the riches under their sea without interference from Russia and Iran, the two other states that rim the Caspian. As major oil and gas producers, Russia and Iran are not overjoyed at their neighbors' good fortune.
In their day, the Soviets never worked seriously at developing Caspian wells, largely because they did not want to create competition for their already flowing Siberian oil. Moscow still feels the same but hasn't figured out how to head off the flow of Caspian oil or to grab a large chunk of the profit. Russia does insert an environmental argument: the oil industry could threaten the Caspian sturgeon and its oily treasure, caviar. For its part, Iran says it will cooperate in Caspian development only if it gets, say, a 20% share of the sea's resources. Both Russia and Iran prefer that pipelines carrying Caspian oil be built or expanded over their territory.
While American energy companies joined the Caspian rush early, the U.S. government was slow to get organized. Some of Washington's top power brokers and law firms went to work for Caspian governments or U.S. companies, selling, consulting, lobbying or opening doors. Among them were former Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, former Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen, and John Sununu, who was George Bush's chief of staff. Perhaps the most active Washington name is former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, now a consultant for Amoco. He has long been a mentor to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and he has warned the White House for years that the U.S. was making a strategic mistake in paying so little attention to the new central Asian nations.
Albright and her senior State Department colleagues sat down for a full-dress CIA briefing on the Caspian last August. The agency had set up a secret task force to monitor the region's politics and gauge its wealth. Covert CIA officers, some well-trained petroleum engineers, had traveled through southern Russia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan to sniff out potential oil reserves. When the policymakers heard the agency's report, Albright concluded that working to mold the area's future was "one of the most exciting things that we can do."