1. Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia (New York: Kodansha International, 1994), p. 1.

2. New York Times, April 26, 2005.

3. Strobe Talbott, “A Farewell to Flashman: American Policy in the Caucasus and Central Asia,” speech, July 21, 1997.

4. New York Times, October 4, 1998 (“our strategy”); Jan Kalicki, “Caspian Energy at the Crossroads,” Foreign Affairs, September – October 2001.

5. Robert Tolf, The Russian Rockefellers: The Saga of the Nobel Family and the Russian Oil Industry (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1976), pp. xiv (“Russian Rockefeller”), 53–55; Steve LeVine, The Oil and the Glory: The Pursuit of Empire and Fortune on the Caspian Sea (New York: Random House, 2007), p. 146; Ronald Suny, “A Journeyman for the Revolution: Stalin and the Labor Movement in Baku,” Soviet Studies, no. 3, 1972; Simon Sebag Montefiore, Young Stalin (New York: Vintage, 2008), p. 187 (“the Oil Kingdom”).

6. Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York: Free Press, 2009), p. 220 (“The Bolsheviks will be cleared”); Geoffrey Jones, The State and the Emergence of the British Oil Industry (London: Macmillan, 1981), pp. 209–11 (Bolsheviks); Alexander Stahlberg, Bounden Duty: The Memoirs of a German Officer, 1932–1945, trans. Patrica Crampton (London: Brassey’s, 1990), pp. 226–27 (“Baku oil”).

7. LeVine, The Oil and the Glory, pp. 50–51; Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Crude Face of Global Capitalism,” New York Times, Sunday Magazine, October 4, 1998.

8. LeVine, The Oil and the Glory, p. 209 “all roads”; Terry Adams, “Baku Oil Diplomacy and ‘Early Oil’ 1994–1998: An External Perspective,” in Azerbaijan in Global Politics: Crafting Foreign Policy (Baku: Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy, 2009), p. 228 (“disruptive”).

9. LeVine, The Oil and the Glory, p. 179 (“native son”); Heydar Aliyev, interview, Azerbaijan International, Winter 1994, pp. 7–9 (“core leadership”).

10. Adams, “Baku Oil Diplomacy,” p. 2 (“Mission Impossible”).

11. “Early Oil Northor West,” Report, n. d.

12. Interview with Jan Kalicki.

13. LeVine, The Oil and the Glory, p. 350.

14. John Browne, speech, CERA “Tale of Three Seas” Conference, June 20, 2001; Frank Verrastro, “Caspian and Central Asia: Lessons Learned from the BTC Experience,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, White Paper, April 2009 (“arrange and negotiate”).

15. David Woodward to author (fax machine).

16. Nick Butler, “Energy: The Changing World Order,” speech, July 5, 2006 (“engineering project”); Washington Post, October 4, 1998 (“real country”).