Charlotte Dennett is a former Middle East reporter, investigative journalist, and attorney. She is the co-author of Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil. Dennett’s brother, Daniel C. Dennett III, famed philosopher and author of From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds and Consciousness Explained, wrote the foreword to her latest book.
“The Crash of Flight 3804 is a triumph on two fronts. First,
it’s a comprehensive history of U.S. involvement in the Middle East
that manages the uncommon feat of placing this history into its
proper context: America’s need for Middle Eastern oil. It also
serves as an exciting, moving account of author Charlotte Dennett’s
decades-long journey to expose the truth behind her father’s
death."—Resilience.org
“Completely eye-opening and unforgettable.”—Naomi Wolf, author of
Outrages
“What makes the book so compelling is how much deeper and broader
she digs than personal memoir. . . . Equal parts Thomas L. Friedman
and Tom Clancy, the book is a remarkable achievement whose
personalized insights on geopolitics are both gripping and
sobering.”—Seven Days
“Dennett displays chill forbearance, detective skills and a
stubborn tenacity that prompted one CIA staffer to suggest she
should work for the agency. Her fine, challenging mind not only
wins a more complex view of the region’s exploitation. She also
delivers her widened respect for her father’s work and
values—despite her own contemporary perspective that sees what he
could not have predicted. . . . Both [Rachel Maddow’s Blowout and
The Crash of Flight 3804] are highly readable, disturbing and also
stirring.”—Ms. Magazine
“What [Dennett] makes clearer than ever is the extent to which
pipelines have in fact been a major factor in more wars than most
people recognize.”—World Beyond War.org
“It’s a tremendous book . . . [that] shatters the notion that wars
are driven by the need to go after tyrants or spread
democracy.”–David Swanson, Talk Radio Nation
“The most extraordinary historical account of pipeline politics and
the blood-drenched Great Game for Oil ever written. Investigative
reporter Charlotte Dennett’s tenacious, decades-long quest to
uncover the truth about the death of her father—America’s first
master spy in the Middle East—has resulted in a riveting saga
replete with previously hidden details about the powerful
characters, countries, and corporations locked in vicious perpetual
competition to control the world’s oil. No book connects the dots
like this one, and with such fascinating clarity. Urgent reading
for anyone looking to understand who and what brought us into the
War on Terror era and how the groundwork for future wars is being
laid.”—Kristina Borjesson, author of Feet to the Fire; creator and
cohost of The Whistleblower Newsroom
“A must-read to understand America’s addiction to endless wars in
the Middle East. Charlotte Dennett masterfully unravels the Great
Game for Oil from the dawn of the Cold War, through Beirut and
Baghdad’s bloody street battles, to today’s tragic headlines. Her
unnerving journey begins with the mysterious death of her father (a
renowned master spy in the Middle East) in the Ethiopian highlands
in 1947 at the onset of the Cold War. Sleuthing through seven
decades of the sinister American-Saudi nexus—framed by FDR and Ibn
Saud—Dennett skillfully shines light on the feudal kingdom that
continues to interlock itself with US interests to this day.
Following a widening nexus of Big Oil, ARAMCO, and Middle East
pipelines to the Eastern Mediterranean, Israel, US Congress, and
the Saudi rulers in Riyadh, Dennett has crafted a page turner that
reads like a thriller. Ironically, her father’s warning echoes
throughout the book: ‘God help us if we ever send troops to the
Middle East.’ Decades on, his daughter has picked up the torch to
illuminate how America’s addiction to endless wars is actually the
ongoing covert battle for energy still being played out in
Afghanistan, Georgia, Russia, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Gaza, Yemen, and
other explosive regions of the world. And the tragedy continues.
Bravissima for Dennett’s courageous, compelling, and unnerving
work!”—Terence Ward, author of The Wahhabi Code
“As a retired US Army colonel and diplomat in Nicaragua, Grenada,
Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia,
Afghanistan, and Mongolia, I found this book to be
fascinating—filled with a treasure trove of details about the
beginning of the oil wars in the Middle East and continuing to
today with the United States ‘guarding’ Syria’s oil fields as it
attempts to overthrow Syria’s Assad government. Dennett reminds us
of the first-ever coup d’état by the CIA. Due to Syrian opposition
to the route of the first pipeline out of Saudi Arabia, the CIA
overthrew Syrian president Shukri al-Quwatli in 1949 and replaced
him with the Army chief of staff who approved the Syrian route.
Dennett’s father, the sole US master spy in the Middle East in the
late 1940s, was involved in pipeline issues and died in a still
unexplained crash of a US government plane. The book goes well
beyond the 1940s and tracks the deals, missteps, and wars for oil.
The detailed maps show pipeline routes over the decades and are
themselves a remarkable way to track the political dynamics of the
region!”—Ann Wright, retired colonel, US Army/Army Reserves; former
US diplomat
“Charlotte Dennett has a fascinating personal saga to share and a
mystery to solve. This book offers the hidden backstory to the
history of US involvement in the Middle East. It is the type of
broad and deep historical dig that is so badly needed, and it helps
us see the bigger picture behind policies and failures that affect
us today. Suddenly, all these wars make sense.”—Russ Baker, author
of Family of Secrets; founder and editor-in-chief, WhoWhatWhy
“Investigative journalist Charlotte Dennett is onto something big.
As an outsider researching her master spy father’s 1947 death at
the dawning of the Great Game for Oil, she takes on the CIA’s
notorious secrecy with fierce determination. That leads Dennett to
the highest echelons of the agency while looking for answers and,
intriguingly, the CIA makes it clear they want her on their side.
Dennett’s telling is a ‘ghost story’ beginning at the foundation of
the CIA that still haunts us today as the world her father died for
disintegrates into chaos. One cannot help but wonder that if her
father had lived, could his nuanced vision for the Middle East have
altered the disastrous course the United States is on now?”—Paul
Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, authors of Invisible History
“A mix of curiosity and loyalty—to family and country—drove
Charlotte Dennett to find out if the ‘humaneness’ ascribed to her
spymaster father by his Harvard professor could have persisted in
the dog-eat-dog espionage surrounding post-WWII access to Middle
East oil. She found abundant material to answer that question and
many others about the early death of her father and about the
origins of the endless wars that have come to characterize the
region he loved. We are gifted with an intriguing, personal account
of the Great Game for Oil and its countless and continuing
casualties.”—Ray McGovern, cofounder, Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity; former CIA analyst
“A father’s death and perhaps murder by ‘allies’ while pursuing a
vital mission for the United States. A daughter’s lifelong search
for truth and justice. Spies. Fortune-seekers. A cast of royals,
brigands, bankers, patriots, and other history-makers struggling to
control oil wealth from Central Asia to the Middle East to Northern
Africa over the past century. Compelling country-by-country current
analysis by an expert reporter and historian. Revelations about the
‘pipeline politics’ that constantly create headlines about endless
war, war crimes, terrorism, and ethnic cleansing, but remain little
understood by Westerners, including major media. All of that is
combined in this page-turning memoir, culminating in a surprise
ending. In brief, this is a masterpiece.”—Andrew Kreig, editor,
Justice Integrity Project; author of Presidential Puppetry
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