The troubleshooter pursed his lips in a silent whistle. “It’d be a neat trick to pull off but I still say, why not let him? If those first countries you named aren’t commie today, they will be tomorrow.”

“Because if we do, it’s one more nail in the coffin of our economy.”

Paul Kosloff waited in silence.

The other said impatiently, “I assume that you haven’t read a book published way back in the 1950s by Vance Packard, a muckraker of the time, entitled The Waste Makers. In it, he points out that although the population of America was but a small fraction of the world’s, the United States economy was using up some fifty percent of the Earth’s resources. He also pointed out that ten years before the United States had been the largest exporter of copper in the world, but was now the largest importer. His book was ignored and all efforts were continued to raise the gross national product year after year. One by one we lost self-sufficiency in almost every raw material we needed for our industry.”

“What’s all this got to do with it?” Kosloff said.

“We need North Africa’s oil, her nickel, copper, iron, chromium, phosphates. We need them badly. The area is comparatively untouched, so far as raw materials are concerned. Practically nothing save oil has been exploited to date. We have reached accomodation with the present regimes in these leftist nations and purchase almost everything they produce and have either sent in, or have made arrangements to send in, further development teams to begin the exploitation of still more of their resources.”

“Well, why couldn’t you do the same with this El Hassan?”

The other nodded, but said impatiently, “Because that’s one of the strongest planks in his revolutionary platform. He contends that the non-developed countries with raw materials, especially North Africa, are being robbed by the industrialized countries such as the United States of the Americas, Common Europe and Japan. He wishes to shove prices for raw materials sky high.”