American Influence on Modern Saudi Arabia
Thomas Lippman at the Cookeville, Tennessee Rotary Club 

Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for being here. Ladies and gentlemen, President Lacy, I�m very pleased to be in Cookeville and have the opportunity to talk to people I might otherwise never had the opportunity to meet if Pat hadn�t arranged this visit, I�m happy to be here.

We�ve had some discussion about what subject to pursue today. Everything I do is related to the Middle East and Islam but the Middle East is such a huge topic, that we tried to narrow the focus, to try to bring you in not just on the generalized discussion of the region that we all know is troubled but to put some things in a new light. 

I thought what I would do today is take a look at the relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia which is a country that we have had a very long intimate relationship and alliance with but about which people really know very little. And I might say that I first went to Saudi Arabia in the mid 1970s. I have been there many, many times so I know a lot more about Saudi Arabia than most Americans but very little because it�s a really difficult society to penetrate. 

On my desk at home is a framed coin. It�s a one riyal, Saudi Arabian silver coin. It was minted in 1944 in Philadelphia. I bet you did not know that as long ago as World War II we were so closely involved with Saudi Arabia that we were minting their coinage. And the silver it was minted of was our silver which we had arranged for the Saudis to get during World War II. Saudi Arabia was desperately poor and there was famine in the Saudi hinterlands during World War II. 

By that time oil had been discovered. President Roosevelt could see Saudi Arabia was going to become increasingly important in the years after the war, and Britain, which had been a traditional protector you might say of the Saudi regime was no longer able to keep on subsidizing Saudi Arabia so we took over. 

So when you go to Saudi Arabia today the first thing that strikes you from the time you get off the plane and walk up the jetway is how much it looks like the United States. You can fall victim right away to what I call the �Riyadh is just like Phoenix syndrome� because there�s a McDonalds on every corner, and there is an ATM in every office building, and the country is fully computerized and air conditioned. There are wheelchair ramps on the new buildings; the country complies with the American�s With Disabilities Act. The electric current is 110 volts not 220 like it is in almost every other place in the world. The car that will take you in from the airport is probably going to be a Chevy Impala. 

That�s because the United States has been deeply and profoundly involved in the development of modern Saudi Arabia for 80 years, and it is fair to say that there is no aspect of modern life in Saudi Arabia other than religion that hasn�t been profoundly influenced by America and Americans over the past decades.

The first Americans to go to Saudi Arabia were not the oil people. The first Americans to go to Saudi Arabia were medical missionaries from the Dutch Reformed Church who had a mission hospital in Bahrain, that little independent island off the coast of Saudi Arabia. They began going into the hinterlands of the Arabian Peninsula back around 1920. In the Arabian Peninsula there was no medical care really of any kind except traditional folk medicine and Americans were invited in by the founding King of Saudi Arabia, Abdul Aziz ibn Saud. The Americans were missionaries but they, of course, were not allowed to proselytize -- specifically to spread Christianity. They were in there to do good works. They were the first Americans that the Saudis knew, and the Saudis experienced Americans who came and gave without taking. Right from the very beginning they were favorably inclined to Americans.

That�s part of the reason why when it came time to bring in a foreign company to look for oil in Saudi Arabia the king chose Standard Oil Company of California over British competitors. He was suspicious of the British, he was not suspicious of the Americans because we had never been colonizers in the Middle East, which the British had. And the British already controlled the oil industries in Iran and Iraq and they didn�t really need any more oil. The King of Saudi Arabia needed cash right away and so he chose an American company that did need crude oil right away, so they would find the oil and begin paying for it.

So if you read books such as Wallace Stegner�s books about America�s old West for example, you read about let�s say, when they were developing mines in Colorado, when the railroad came. When an industrial corporation went into remote corners of this country or South America or wherever and began to set up operations there certain things would happen around it. The government would run a road and a phone line up there lets say. Local entrepreneurs would come in and begin to open up services for the people building the mines, or looking for the oil or whatever it was. Somebody would open a laundry, and so forth. You know, all the things you really need, when you are working the mines all day. 

None of that happened in Saudi Arabia because the people of Saudi Arabia, through no fault of their own, brought nothing to the table. They were not familiar with basic tools. They were almost entirely illiterate. There were virtually no paved roads. There were no public schools. There was, as I said, no medical care. And so the oil company going into Saudi Arabia had to bring in everything from scratch. Every pipe and length of wire, and every vehicle and every building had to be imported from the United States, or from somewhere. And the local labor had to be trained from scratch. 

You know our kids grew up tinkering. In my generation they had Heathkit radios, you know, and nowadays they have all kinds of electronic devices. The Saudi young people were not familiar with the screwdriver. Basic tools they did not have. So the process of bringing the people of Saudi Arabia into contact with and familiarizing themselves with the American way of doing business began with the basic schooling of young Saudi boys back in the late 1930�s and early 1940�s. 

Today they Oil Minister of Saudi Arabia, Ali Naimi, and the President of the National Oil Company Saudi Aramco, the world�s largest integrated oil company, both of those gentlemen began their lives as illiterate teenage �go-fers� working for the American oil company and the Americans sent them to school. They sent Ali Naimi to Lehigh and then to some place else to get his doctorate in geology. 

So American faculty came in and set up schools over there and the Saudis, who were very shrewd negotiators, began the process of laying things on top. They said we want those schools to be open not just to oil company employees but also to all people of that region. And the oil company became the leader of development for the entire eastern part of Saudi Arabia. The oil company was there to make money of course, but they basically had to do what the King wanted because otherwise the King could revoke the concession and give it to some other oil company. 

Now you have the process by which Americans are in there bringing tools and vehicles and schooling. The Saudis at that time had no national currency. There were all different kinds of money, mostly foreign coinage. Even Austrian coins were used in different places around the country. 

They created a paper script that would be used, theoretically, only by the pilgrims and only during the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. Almost overnight, of course, it became accepted as paper money around the country. And if you go to the website of Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency or the National Museum in Riyadh you can see color photos of this script.

At this point Americans have brought basic schooling. The oil company opened clinics to provide medical care for its workers. Those too became sort of general purpose hospitals for the Saudi population. The Americans created the central bank and then there is a whole new aspect of the American development in Saudi Arabia. 

While I was doing research for �Inside the Mirage� I examined this whole relationship and came upon a wonderful woman in Texas named Mildred Logan now probably in her mid 80�s but you couldn�t tell it. She was a real pistol. Mildred Logan first went to rural Saudi Arabia in 1951 as a young wife, a tall blond unveiled women -- you can imagine the phenomenon, you can imagine the excitement in Al Kharj in Saudi Arabia when she showed up. 

What was she doing there? She had married a man named Sam Logan who had been brought to Saudi Arabia by the King to manage the huge royal farms that were in Al Kharj.. ..the Al Kharj oasis south of Riyadh where the Saudis had discovered reservoirs of underground water and so there was an agricultural project there. The King was trying to increase agricultural output due to the growing number of people that had to be fed. At his behest the oil company essentially mechanized Saudi agriculture. They brought in the first pumps. They brought in the first refrigerated trucks. They brought in techniques of desert agriculture. They brought in agronomists from places like Arizona State University and they developed mechanized agriculture. 

Today agriculture is the second biggest industry in Saudi Arabia after the petroleum industry, the second largest component of Saudi GDP and the biggest employer is the agricultural and food processing sector in Saudi Arabia. Mildred Logan wrote wonderful articles about her experiences, about the women there the interacting with the Saudi people and how she brought them basic techniques of healthful child rearing, for example. Which again through no fault of their own they had never been exposed to. 

For better of worse Americans also brought television to Saudi Arabia. The first television was self-contained within the oil company village over there -- the oil company compound in the town known as Dhahran. It didn�t exist before 1936 or so. It was built to be the American town, where Americans lived isolated from their Saudi surroundings. They had swimming pools, the women could ride bicycles and drive cars all the things they couldn�t do outside, they did in Dhahran. And by the end of the 1940�s the Americans in Dhahran wanted what Americans here wanted, TV. And so they had a sort of closed circuit TV, but it wasn�t really closed. It was available to Saudis outside the walls in the surrounding towns who had access to television sets. 

The oil company broadcast American TV sitcoms without the ads and without the kissing scenes and they also broadcast public service programs aimed at Saudi women. These were essentially programs about what we used to call home economics. And they were very, very valuable to and valued by the women of Eastern Saudi Arabia because they had no other access to education or informational inputs from outside the family. And basic techniques of healthful child rearing and housekeeping and things to which they otherwise had no access, even animal husbandry, were broadcast on these TV sets. 

Fast-forwarding a few years, President Kennedy had a meeting with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Faisal who later became King. And Faisal and Kennedy essentially made a deal in which Faisal promised Kennedy that when he became King he would abolish slavery, which in deed he did, and in exchange Kennedy sent the US Army Corps of Engineers and NBC technicians to create a national television broadcasting network, which was the basis of Saudi Arabian state television today. They had an English language news program on there. The first American to appear on that program was a guy who is still teaching at the University of Kentucky. He wrote a book about his experiences over there. 

In 1945, just a couple of months before Germany surrendered to end the war there was a famous meeting between President Franklin Roosevelt and the King of Saudi Arabia, King Abdul Aziz bin Saud. The meeting took place aboard a ship, a cruiser of the US Navy in the Suez Canal when Roosevelt was on his way home from the meeting with Churchill and Stalin at Yalta. It was a famous meeting and it�s often said, although not quite correctly, at that meeting was created the basic alliance between the United States and Saudi Arabia in which they provided us with oil and we provide them with security. That alliance actually preceded the meeting but the meeting was very important because it created a personal bond between the King of Saudi Arabia and America, and Americans, and the United States.

At that meeting the President of the United States gave the King of Saudi Arabia two gifts, one was the spare wheelchair that always traveled with him. Roosevelt, as you all know, was in a wheelchair and he, being the President of the United States, there was always a back up in case something were to happen to his wheelchair. He noticed the King had difficulty walking because of old war wounds and arthritis and he spontaneously gave the King his other wheelchair. 

The other gift was a DC3. It was obvious why the King of Saudi Arabia would want an airplane. The country is the size of the United States east of the Mississippi and didn�t have any roads. And remember that the modern Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has only existed since 1932. The first 30 years of the twentieth century Abdul Aziz was busy conquering the whole country and bringing all the tribes under his control and he still did not have absolute consolidated control of the country by 1945. And an airplane facilitated his ability to go around the country and buy loyalty by handing out, guess what, coins, and also by marrying women of other tribes to bring them into his circle of loyalty. The airplane mattered a lot to the King. I might say parenthetically that in the National Archives there are some very funny memos that went back and forth between the State Department and the War Department over whose budget was going to cover the cost of this airplane that the President gave to the King of Saudi Arabia. 

An American pilot from TWA flew that plane over to Saudi Arabia and delivered it over there and became the Kings personal pilot. He was honored last year at the age of 99 at a reception at the Saudi Embassy in Washington, which I was privileged to attend. He�s a wonderful old guy. Anyway Joe [Grant] flew that plane over there and presented it to the King who had it outfitted with a rotating throne so he could always face Mecca while he was airborne. That plane became the first plane in the fleet of what became the national airline of Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabian Airlines. Where did that airline come from? 

Well, I am going to introduce a new player into this drama. Howard Hughes. Howard Hughes was at that time the founder and proprietor of what was known as Transcontinental and Western Airlines. Later Trans World Airlines or TWA. His airline had just been granted, in those days the American government decided which planes could fly where, remember the good old days. TWA had just been granted the right to fly the Cairo to Bombay route and they wanted a place to stop and refuel on the way that was not under British control. 

This fit in very nicely with the growing American presence in Dhahran, around the oil town, they wanted air service. And so essentially there was a three way deal cut in which the King granted the United States military the right to build a military air field in Dhahran. Remember the war is still going on. We are fighting a two front war. We wanted an airfield somewhere between the two. The United States got the right to build a military airfield and in exchange for that the King insisted that Americans come in and create a national airline for Saudi Arabia. And TWA did that. And for the next 25 or 30 years Americans from TWA -- pilots, flight crews, cabin crews, mechanics, schedulers -- lived in Saudi Arabia operating the national airline of Saudi Arabia and training Saudis how to do that. 

Today TWA no longer exists, but Saudi Arabia�s airline is the biggest and most successful airline in the Middle East. The only reason it doesn�t make money is that the government insists that the domestic flights' costs be held very low, to subsidize the population and because they provide discount flights for pilgrims. It would make money if it was privatized but then those public services wouldn�t exist. 

So you can see that there are many ways in which Americans were deeply involved in Saudi Arabia. In all this time the Saudis are using their money to modernize the country. They needed airports and hospitals and power plants and highways, you name it they needed it. Who built those things? Bechtel and General Electric built most of them. Many hundreds of thousands of Americans lived and worked in Saudi Arabia for years creating what is now the most advanced infrastructure in the Middle East. Now many of those contracts will go to Korean firms or even local Saudi Arabian firms, which of course there were none at the time.

Then in 1974, the spring of 1974 President Richard Nixon, about to be driven from office by the Watergate scandal made a kind of last hurrah trip to the Middle East. He went to Egypt and reopened diplomatic relations that had been closed since the 1967 war, and then he became the first American president to go to Saudi Arabia. 

As a result of that meeting -- remember by the mid 1970s oil prices were going through the roof after the embargo in 1974, and Saudi Arabia was drowning in cash. They were taking it in far faster than they could spend it, even with all the infrastructure development they had to do. So as a result of that trip to Saudi Arabia by President Nixon this country and Saudi Arabia created an outfit known as the Joint US-Saudi Arabian Economic Commission. It was operated by the Treasury Department not by the State Department, not by AID. It wasn�t an aid program. The Saudis didn�t need financial aid. They needed technical aid. 

What did that Commission do? Saudi Arabia was essentially a country that had no tradition of public service, there was in effect, no government. The King and his few councilors had to do everything because they didn�t have the kind of operating, functional level public service agencies we take for granted. The people who give you your license plates, or run the credit bureau or whatever it is. You know, the county extension agency. They didn�t have any of that. And they went through a long painful process, first run by the Ford Foundation, to try to create what we would call a bureaucracy that you would have to have in a modern country. 

The U.S.-Saudi Commission -- its purpose was two fold. One was to help the Saudis create the instrumentalities of government at every level, and the other was to ensure that in doing so they would give all their contracts to Americans, to try to recycle some of those oil dollars that we were spending in such large numbers. As a result of that, from that time in 1974 through the end of Bill Clinton�s presidency, 25 years American public servants, people from the Census Bureau, people from the Department of Labor, from the Department of the Interior -- American bureaucrats were seconded directly into their counterpart agencies in Saudi Arabia to work with the people there to show them how to do this stuff. Americans taught Saudis such basic things as how to calculate the consumer price index, how to collect customs fees, how to do the basic instrumentalities of government. 

People from the National Park Service created Saudi Arabia�s first national park. The Asir National Park down in the mountains of the beautiful southwest in Saudi Arabia. There is a guy now running a national park in Arkansas who lived in Saudi Arabia for three years creating that national park. And so the result is you have a society that looks like Phoenix, and is fully modernized in every mechanical and material sense. 

At all times during this process the understanding was that we would keep our hands off and our noses out of Saudi Arabia�s internal domestic and religion affairs. Hands off Saudi society. And that is exactly what we have done. You may say that we have done that to our detriment, but that was the price for doing business with and having a strategic alliance with Saudi Arabia. And it was considered so valuable that every president with the limited exception of Kennedy essentially has decided that if the Saudis want to cut off hands for thievery, if the Saudis want to have multiple wives, if the Saudis want to keep the religious court system that features drum head justice and torture in the prisons, we�re going to write about that stuff in the annual report that comes out of the State Department, but we�re not going to do anything about it.

I think the historical record, which I have examined pretty closely, shows that the only way in which this issue arose in any serious way was over Saudi Arabia�s refusal to admit any Jews into the country. For twenty years the State Department, the oil company and the US Air Force, the US military complied with Saudi Arabia�s insistence that no Jews be sent into Saudi Arabia. 

Kennedy took this issue on because there was a Jewish Congressman from New York who was trying to get a visa to go to Saudi Arabia and Kennedy went after the King of Saudi Arabia on this subject. And he basically said to the King, �Look, Your Majesty, this guy doesn�t even really want to go to Saudi Arabia. He�s just using this issue to embarrass your country. So give him a visa to shut him up, and he won�t even go there. You won�t have to admit this Jew into your country.� That�s a pretty cynical offer that seems to me. But King Saud didn't accept it. So this issue festered until Henry Kissinger became Secretary of State. The Saudis could not keep out Henry Kissinger. And I might say, not to go on too long. I want to leave some time for your questions. 

You know in modern times traditionally members of the State Department press corps, of which I was one for many years, travel with the Secretary of State when he or she goes somewhere. And I remember very vividly my colleague Marilyn Berger who was Jewish, went on one of Kissinger�s early trips to Saudi Arabia and when she came back to the Washington Post newsroom, we all gathered around and said �Marilyn, Marilyn, a Jew is Saudi Arabia, what�s up, you know � and she said �Listen my friends, the problem was not that I was Jewish, the problem was that I was a women. There was no place to go to the bathroom.� Because women aren�t suppose to be in public places, or gathering places with men in Saudi Arabia, so there are no facilities for them to be there. That was the real issue. Once Kissinger broke that taboo and King Faisal died, King Faisal was assassinated in 1975, it is no longer an issue.

So I say that just so -- I want to give you a new way of thinking about Saudi Arabia. When you read about the 9-11 hijackers, when you read about the infiltration of terrorists, when you read about Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, think about it. In a lot of ways the Saudi Arabia of today is the Saudi Arabia we made.

BY THOMAS LIPPMAN ON SUSRIS.ORG

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• Determined to Remain Friends - A Conversation with Thomas Lippman - Exclusive - SUSRIS Interview - Aug 7, 2007

• A New Regional Leadership - Thomas W. Lippman - SUSRIS IOI - May 10, 2007

• Anniversary of Historic Meeting between Ibn Saud and FDR - Feb 14, 2007

• Region in Crisis: Fine Lines and Consequences - A Conversation with Thomas W. Lippman - SUSRIS Interview - Aug 2, 2006

• Crawford Summit Perspective: A Conversation with Thomas Lippman - SUSRIS Interview - May 9, 2005

• Insight on the Kingdom from the Author of Inside the Mirage -- A Conversation with Thomas Lippman - Part One - SUSRIS Interview - March 30, 2005

• Insight on the Kingdom from the Author of Inside the Mirage -- A Conversation with Thomas Lippman - Part Two - SUSRIS Interview - Apr 18, 2005

• U.S.-Saudi Relations: A Glass Half Empty, Or Half Full? - An Interview With Thomas Lippman - Exclusive - SUSRIS Interview - Aug 28, 2004

• Thomas Lippman - "Inside The Mirage" - US-Saudi Relations -- SAIS Panel - SUSRIS IOI - Dec 16, 2003