Where’s our Wanda? In a world that fears peak oil, climate change, blackmail by energy czars and volatile prices, it is hard to get a clear view of the choices we face.

We lack an authoritative and dispassionate guide. We lack, in short, the 21st-century successor to Wanda Jablonski, a petite but steely oil journalist who for 40 years spoke on equal terms with shahs, sheikhs and oil barons. But however close her relationships with some of the world’s most powerful men, her real achievements were to enlighten her readership and to advance the debate.

Wanda – by the age of 30, her surname was unnecessary in oil circles – was the world’s most influential oil journalist, who had a claim to being the midwife to Opec. Her achievement was all the more remarkable in that she was a woman in three intensely masculine spheres: big oil, the Middle East and business journalism.

Wanda was a child of the oil industry. Her father, Eugene Jablonski, was a brilliant Slovak petroleum geologist who plied his trade across the globe between the world wars. Wanda followed her parents from Poland to Texas, from Egypt to New Zealand, with occasional spells at English boarding schools, and by the time she went to Cornell University during the Second World War, she was steeped in petroleum knowledge.

But while by 1945 she was very definitely an American, she had also acquired a cosmopolitan outlook rare in the United States of those times. Glamorous and lively, she married a handsome war hero who went on to become a successful corporate lawyer. She was unwilling to settle into the role of trophy spouse and took a lowly job on the New York Journal of Commerce, swiftly moving up the ladder to be Petroleum Editor – although always under the gender-neutral byline of W. M. Jablonski. Many readers thought her name was William.

The oil industry in the 1940s was very different from today’s multi-faceted and globalised marketplace. The power lay with a handful of large, mostly American and British oil companies – the so-called Seven Sisters, although Total, of France, and Eni, of Italy, brought it up to nine. The companies were secretive, although they shared information when it was useful to do so. With postwar reconstruction in Europe and the US economy booming, demand for oil increased rapidly. Concessions established in the Middle East were becoming more important and the Sisters were rapidly raising output of crude oil from Iran, Iraq, Kuwait and, above all, Saudi Arabia.

It is not remembered in these days of high oil prices that the Sisters kept prices low in order to encourage consumption. Although they may have exploited the oil producers of the Third World, they were not price-gougers. The companies had more or less complete control over the production, export and pricing of the oil. The governments of the producing nations were largely ignorant of the markets into which their oil was sold and of the terms on which it was sold.

Yet the drums were beating – and Wanda was willing to listen. In 1948 she caused a stir in the industry with a long and sympathetic interview with Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonso, the Venezuelan finance minister. The message was that natural justice demanded the producing nations should receive half of the proceeds from the sale of their oil and that the companies should work their concessions harder.

By now the Seven Sisters were paying close attention. Wanda was invited to interview, off the record, the board of Standard Oil New Jersey (today’s Exxon). Word got round and from then on she was welcome in the board-rooms of all the big companies.

Wanda’s deep knowledge of the industry, combined with her persistence, began to bring other scoops. In Saudi Arabia she made friends with the young Abdullah Tariki, the country’s first oil minister, and helped him to understand the task ahead of him.

Tariki and his counterparts had only a vague grasp of the ways in which the oil companies exploited them – but they were learning quickly and when Wanda interviewed Tariki, by now a close friend, in 1956, the minister was confident enough to demand not only a 50:50 split (ultra-modest by 21st-century standards) but also greater Saudi control over Aramco, the company owned by Exxon, Chevron, Mobil and Texaco, which actually ran the Saudi oil industry. As Tariki tried to implement these policies, Aramco stopped talking to him directly. This was a stupid move, but Wanda became an unofficial intermediary.

Wanda was unabashed by the challenges of being a female travelling alone in the Middle East. Her hosts, by and large, were fascinated by her and treated her courteously. In Tehran to interview the Shah, the chain-smoking Wanda had been relieved of her cigarettes by his guards. When she decided that the Shah – himself a chain-smoker – was saying nothing of interest, she stopped taking notes and asked whether she might smoke. When the Shah assented, she made him bring her the box and asked him to light her cigarette. Having achieved this smokers’ communion, they got down to business, and the Shah gave her an interview which upset everyone.

In the late 1950s, the producing governments, although better informed than when Wanda had begun her career, were still operating in isolation, while the Seven Sisters, without openly colluding, managed to coordinate their affairs. Tariki had begun to think about cooperating with other producers and Wanda introduced him to Pérez Alfonso in Cairo in 1960 (the lubricant was either Coca-Cola or scotch, depending on the audience). This was the origin of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec), which a decade later reshaped the world’s economic order.

In 1961, Wanda, now divorced and in her early forties, struck out on her own, establishing Petroleum Intelligence Weekly. PIW is still a taut, eight-page newsletter printed on distinctive yellow airmail paper. Stories were extensively researched and tightly written, rarely exceeding 500 words. PIW aimed to encapsulate everything of commercial, economic, political and legal significance in the oil industry. With Wanda’s contacts and a small professional staff, it became required reading across the oil world. Though edited from New York, it had a cosmopolitan appeal and continued to enlighten the opposing sides of the industry. PIW has been described as the most successful newsletter of all time and it made Wanda very wealthy.

As Anna Rubino, a former PIW staffer, shows in Queen of the Oil Club, Wanda continued to grow in stature over the 25 years that she ran PIW. But as the oil industry – and perhaps more importantly, the information industry – grew more complex, her influence waned. However, she retained the ear of the industry’s leaders, notably

Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, Tariki’s successor as Saudi oil minister, and the man who did most to turn the tables on the oil companies. Her last scoop, before selling PIWin 1988, was the true story of Yamani’s sacking by the Saudi Royal Family – a sorry tale that continues to resonate today with the scandalous al-Yamamah contract.

Inevitably, it was suggested that Wanda had slept her way to success, but Ms Rubino demonstrates that this was not true. Wanda was far too shrewd to get involved with oil industry executives. But she certainly knew how to party and in middle age had one serious love affair, with a glamorous Irish Jesuit, Fr Malachi Martin, said to have been the model for the Jesuit in The Omen.

Queen of the Oil Club is deeply researched and an absorbing read. In two cynical industries (oil and information), Ms Rubino shows the importance in a journalist of knowledge, integrity and sympathy: Wanda understood that she had to communicate all sides of a story to her readers. It is notable that while she went out of her way to explain the producers’ view-point to the companies, she was not shy of telling the producers where they had got it wrong.

In an era dazzled by a spectrum of spin from neo-con to radical environmentalist, Wanda’s legacy is – or ought to be – a commitment by her successors to a rational assessment of the facts, and a human sympathy for those who do not appear to share one’s point of view.

- Queen of the Oil Club: The Intrepid Wanda Jablonski and the Power of Information, by Anna Rubino; £21.99, Beacon Press

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