Texaco had become Spain’s principal oil supplier the year before the Nationalist coup. When Franco and his fellow conspirators made their grab for power, Rieber decided not to follow his contract with the Republican government’s state oil company, but to make a deal with the new autocrat on the scene. Knowing that military trucks, tanks, and aircraft need not only fuel but a range of engine oils and other lubricants, he quickly ordered a supply of drums and cans of these on hand at the French port of Bordeaux to be loaded into an empty Texaco tanker and shipped to the Nationalists.
As often happens, political feelings were reinforced by a personal tie. The friendship was between Rieber and a much younger man, José Antonio Álvarez Alonso, a twenty-eight-year-old English-speaking official of the Spanish government oil company. When that organization had signed its contract with Texaco in 1935, it bought a Texaco tanker, and the Spaniard traveled to the corporation’s pipeline terminal at Port Arthur, Texas, to mark the occasion and meet Texaco’s new chairman. Álvarez Alonso was an enthusiast of his country’s Fascist movement, the Falange Española, and as Rieber showed him around the ship, the two men hit it off, realizing they saw the world the same way. The Texaco chieftain invited his new friend back to the United States a few months later, to attend an oil industry meeting in Los Angeles. After the Nationalist uprising began in 1936, Republican-held Madrid became a dangerous place for Fascists, and Álvarez Alonso fled to France. He knew the Nationalists would be short of oil, and from Marseille sent a telegram to William M. Brewster, Texaco’s representative in the French capital. Immediately a reply came back: COME TO PARIS. CAPTAIN RIEBER IS HERE AND WOULD LIKE TO SEE YOU.
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