CARTEL

The author of Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald tries his hand at the killer gamesmanship behind the multinational oil cartel plot which supposedly engineered the 1953 overthrow of the Iranian government and Prime Minister Mossadeq. lake Jasmine is a young hothead in the political science department at Harvard, and his course on ""The Pathology of Politics"" has stolen the student limelight from Galbraith and Schlesinger. lake ignores the paper constitutions and legal maneuvers that other professors discuss and concentrates instead on coups d'État. After all, he personally helped Nelson Rockefeller engineer Venezuela into becoming a sealed-off Rockefeller holding. The British have been keeping a tight hand clamped on Iranian oil and refusing to let it onto the world market. But now the Premier wants to nationalize the country's holdings, and ""the cartel"" of the seven sisters of oildom is determined that the CIA help return the ousted Shah of Iran to power and hand back that nation's oil interests. lake is asked by a CIA officer to outline a game ""in thirty-six moves"" by which the company could plan an ""abstract"" coup in a fictional country he soon recognizes as Iran. Then the rules change, after the game is run through in the CIA game room, and he's told he must add assassination to the available moves. Soon lake is James Bonding about Europe and Iran, killing agents and trying to save Mossadeq. Freewheeling conspiracy fantasy, but somewhat classier than most.