the "Seven Sisters", a term he coined to refer to the dominant oil companies of the mid-20th century, Mattei initiated agreements with the poorest countries of the Middle East and countries of the former Eastern Bloc as well. Mattei visited Moscow in 1959, where he brokered an oil import deal with the Soviet Union in the middle of the Cold War over intense protests from NATO and the United States. He also publicly supported independence movements against colonial powers, which allowed ENI to take advantage of postcolonial bitterness in places like Algeria. To opponents who charged that he was helping Communists and making Italy dependent on a capricious flow from the Soviet Union, Mattei answered that he bought from the cheapest sources. Mattei forged agreements with Tunisia and Morocco, to which he offered a 50–50 partnership for extracting their oil, very different from the sort of concessions normally offered by the major oil companies. To Iran and Egypt, he additionally offered that the risk involved in prospecting was entirely ENI's: if there was no petrol, the countries would not have to pay one cent. In 1957, with ENI already competing with giants like Esso or Shell, rumour has it that Mattei was secretly financing the independence movement against colonialist France in the Algerian War. In 1960, after concluding the agreement with the Soviet Union and while negotiating with China, Mattei publicly declared that the American monopoly was over. The reaction was initially mild, and he was invited to take part in the partition of the prospecting map in the Sahara. Mattei made the independence of Algeria a condition of his acceptance, and no agreement would be subscribed until that event. As a consequence of his stance, Mattei was considered to have become a target of the French far-right terrorist organization Organisation armée secrète (OAS), opposed to Algeria's independence, which began sending him explicit threats. Death On a 27 October 1962 flight from Catania, Sicily, to the Milan Linate Airport, Mattei's jetplane, a Morane-Saulnier MS.760 Paris, crashed in the surroundings of the small village of Bascapè in Lombardy. The cause of the accident has been a mystery. There are strong indications that the crash was caused by a bomb hidden in the airplane. All three men on board were killed: Mattei, his pilot Irnerio Bertuzzi, and the American Time–Life journalist William McHale. The inquiries officially declared that it was an accident.