Arabian Knight: Colonel Bill Eddy - Thomas Lippman's New Book

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September 15, 2008

SUSRIS EXCLUSIVE

Arabian Knight: Colonel Bill Eddy USMC and the Rise of American Power in the Middle East
A Conversation with Thomas Lippman

Editor's Note:

We are pleased today to bring you our conversation with Mr. Thomas Lippman about his new book, Arabian Knight: Colonel Bill Eddy USMC and the Rise of American Power in the Middle East.

In his latest work, Mr. Lippman provides important details and perspective on the dawning of the "official" U.S.-Saudi relationship through one of its chief contributors, Colonel Bill Eddy of the United States Marine Corps. This week at SUSRIS, we will present excerpts from the new book. In the interview that follows, Mr. Lippman talks about Bill Eddy and sets the scene for the excerpts that will follow.

Thomas Lippman is an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute and a former Washington Post Middle East bureau chief. He is author of Inside the Mirage: America's Fragile Relationship with Saudi Arabia, published in 2004.

SUSRIS EXCLUSIVE
Arabian Knight: Colonel Bill Eddy USMC and the Rise of American Power in the Middle East
A Conversation with Thomas Lippman

SUSRIS: Was Bill Eddy one of the larger than life figures in American history and international affairs who may also have been symbolic of the development of the American relationship with the Middle East in general and Saudi Arabia in particular?

Thomas Lippman: There are two ways that I look at this. One was that I discovered that Eddy kept popping up as I did research on various aspects, particularly on the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia but also on other developments about the Middle East.

I realized the more I learned about him, the more I learned that he led one of the most interesting lives of any American in the first half of the 20th century. He had many different incarnations. Not only was he a central figure in the development of the relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia, he was a very prescient observer of the Middle East, and as far as I know, was the first person who really raised the alarm about the potential rise of extremist Islamist terrorism.

He appears even today as our most prominent scholar of the works of Jonathan Swift, whose critical essays about the literature of that period still stands in libraries.

Of course, he was very influential in shaping the creation of the U.S. CIA. So when you add up all of that, plus his work in Beirut where after he left government service all the things going on in Lebanon - he had fingers in many pies.

I thought this was an interesting story. But the question was what did this add up to besides an American leading an interesting life in the Middle East? To me, what it provided was a way to examine this question: "When you see on the television or read in the news that the United States did this, that or the other in the Middle East, the question is how come? When did that get to be our problem -- since it never was before World War II?" To retrace the story of Eddy's life is to help to understand how we got to be in this situation.

SUSRIS: The book is a remarkable story but especially for someone who's interested in the Middle East.

Lippman: It is that but it is also insightful into the history and the exploits of the Marine Corps. Eddy did something then that was unusual, and I don't know if you can do it today. He was part of a small group of promising young men who got direct commissions in the Marine Corps. He didn't go to the Naval Academy; he didn't go to any service academy. He didn't even have ROTC training in college. But the Marine Corps was looking for shall we say a "few good officers" as they built up to World War I. They took these young men in on direct commissions; he became an officer in the Marine Corps. His life became the embodiment of the old saying, "You're never an ex-Marine." As you see in the first chapter he distinguished himself at the WWI battle of Belleau Wood in France, which was the greatest battle in the history of the U.S. Marine Corps at that point.

Then of course, there's the whole section in which Bill Eddy was the chief of the Office of Strategic Services [forerunner to the Central Intelligence Agency], the OSS, operation in North Africa leading up to Operation Torch., the Allied landings in the early part of World War II. The OSS turns out to have been a really fascinating and almost unimaginable. It's hard to admit that the U.S. government would even do business like that today. It was sort of the intelligence equivalent of a neighborhood street football game, "Everybody go deep, and I'll throw it down by the parked car on the corner." Bill Donovan hired all kinds of people - geniuses and quacks, cranks and people of all different kinds of skills - and he turned them loose on the world.

Bill Eddy came from environments that didn't lend themselves to freelancing. One was a missionary background; one was the Marine Corps; and one was the academic world. And yet he thrived in this make it up as you go along operation that Bill Donovan sent him on -- where you couldn't do it by the book because there was no book.

His work in North Africa was essential to the success of Operation Torch, which was the first great Allied counterattack against Nazi Germany. So when you add all of that up, I mean he was a pretty interesting guy. But the cumulative effect of his life turned out to have a prominent importance for American foreign policy.

SUSRIS: How did he wind up involved in Saudi Arabia?

Lippman: When it was apparent that the United States was soon going to get into World War II, Eddy was then president of Hobart College and he was fed up with academic politics. He wrangled an assignment to go back into uniform as a reserve officer in the Marine Corps, despite the permanent infirmity of a limp -- resulting from his World War I injuries.

Eddy wasn't going to go to combat duty, but he became the U.S. Naval Attach� in Cairo. Of course German General Rommel's troops were coming across to El Alamein in Egypt and the British were trying to defend the canal. There was a lot at stake in Cairo. So he was back on active duty when he was recommended to Donovan as the guy who should prepare the ground for Operation Torch.

While serving in Cairo, he investigated an explosion aboard a ship and in his report back to the Office of Naval Intelligence, he put in what seems to have been an unsolicited essay about the future importance of Saudi Arabia. At that time the Kingdom was not on anyone's radar screen in Washington.

After Operation Torch, he was no longer needed in North Africa. But he was needed in a place where he was clearly interested and where the State Department, the War Department and the White House were all looking toward the future. They wanted somebody who was an Arabic speaker with intelligence experience and who was trusted in Washington to go to Saudi Arabia to open what amounted to a new frontier in American strategic interests. Bill Eddy was the guy chosen to do that but he was not the senior diplomat when he went out there. He was sort of an all-purpose intelligence, State Department political officer. But the senior diplomat was soon moved on, and Bill Eddy was already in place and he became the defacto ambassador in Jeddah.

So by the end of 1943, it was time for him to have new assignment. President Roosevelt by that time was very, very interested in developing a future and post-war relationship with Saudi Arabia in which he had become very interested. Bill Eddy was the instrument chosen to do that.

SUSRIS: So that was the basis for the first diplomatic foothold in the Kingdom?

Lippman: This is peculiar history. When the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was created, proclaimed in 1932, the United States recognized it and named an ambassador, but the ambassador didn't actually go there. The ambassador in Egypt was also the ambassador to Saudi Arabia. All of the diplomats lived in Cairo, although they were accredited to Saudi Arabia. It wasn't until later in the middle of World War II when the future strategic importance of Saudi Arabia was becoming apparent that we opened a resident diplomatic mission in Jeddah. The first inhabitant was a member of the State Department, a career Arabist named James Moose, who later became the ambassador in Syria. But Moose ran afoul of the advisors to King Abdulaziz. The King wanted a meeting with Roosevelt and the advisors told Washington that Moose was insufficiently enthusiastic about that project. So they pulled Moose out and reassigned him, and they in effect put Eddy in his place. Eddy was already there, he spoke Arabic, he was known to the King; he was trusted by the State Department, he had intelligence experience, and he was obviously interested in Saudi Arabia. They knew that from his memo two years earlier, and so it was a logical succession. So they elevated the status of the post to minister counselor, the equivalent of ambassador. Thus Bill Eddy became the defacto ambassador to Saudi Arabia.

SUSRIS: A case of the being in the right place at the right time?

Lippman: Yes, but it was an extremely difficult job. Partly because Saudi Arabia was pretty primitive and partly because the King was 800 miles from where you were at that time. All of the diplomatic missions were in Jeddah on the Red Sea coast, but the King was in Riyadh and of course there was no road. It wasn't an easy place to be ambassador.

SUSRIS: What was his legacy in the foundation of the relationship?

Lippman: After the famous meeting between Franklin Roosevelt and King Abdul Aziz in February of 1945 -- a meeting by the way that I think could have never come about successfully if not for Bill Eddy. It was his skill in orchestrating the Saudi end of it and the movement of the Saudi delegation and the King and handling the diplomacy as well as the interpretation of the meeting that made it possible.

After the FDR and Ibn Saud meeting each side wanted certain things from the other, and Bill Eddy as the senior U.S. representative in Saudi Arabia made those things happen. The most immediately important of which was the development of a strategic airbase for the United States in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. It became a cornerstone of the relationship between the two countries for decades after that. The other was establishing a permanent relationship between the United States and the Kingdom in which the King came to trust Americans. It made possible the survival of this relationship after Truman accepted the partition of Israel and recognized it in 1948.

Eddy was gone, but by then the King was firmly planted in the American camp. He stayed there despite deep disagreement over that issue. Bill Eddy made a lot of things happen. Up until Eddy's tenure, the British had a 100 percent monopoly on all external communications with Saudi Arabia so that even Aramco had to charter a boat with a radio transmitter and anchor it offshore so they did not have to go through British communications when they had something secret to say. The same applied to the American diplomatic mission. Bill Eddy broke the British communications monopoly. He opened the door to the first introduction into Saudi Arabia of American companies that went out there to build the infrastructure of the country.

SUSRIS: Let's drop back a little bit. Fill in some of the blanks about the arrangement of the meeting between FDR and Ibn Saud on USS Quincy.

Lippman: You know the issues were serious, but it's really a very funny story because you would think, "Okay I am going to send a U.S. Navy destroyer in wartime to pick you up and bring you to a meeting with me a sea, two days sail away, no problem, right?"

The King had never been to sea, had never traveled outside the Arabian Peninsula. It never occurred to him that he would travel anywhere without his full entourage. Not only was he going to bring 100 people, he was going to bring his wives and he was going to bring enough sheep to feed everybody. How the Navy dealt with that, and how Eddy dealt with it was really a very funny story.

The USS Murphy, the destroyer dispatched to pick up the King, sailed with sheep on the fan tail to accommodate the Saudi's diet. And of course Eddy was the only person on that ship who spoke both languages. Remember that when the Murphy sailed into Jeddah to fetch the King, no U.S. warship had ever been there, and the Navy's only chart of the harbor had been drawn in about 1834. It was an interesting assignment.

SUSRIS: What else should people know about Eddy and his relevance in the history of the United States and its interests in Saudi Arabia and the wider region?

Lippman: What they should know is this - Bill Eddy who grew up in Lebanon, who spent his boyhood among the Arabs, didn't see the relationship with Saudi Arabia as a tactical arrangement in which people would make money and sell weapons. It could be that, but he actually had a much grander vision of an almost spiritual alliance between the Christian world and the Muslim world -- in which two groups of monotheists would in effect unite around what they had in common rather than around their differences. Not only would there not be a clash of civilizations, but there would be a harmony of civilizations. It is just as well that he died when he did because we are as far from that as he could have imagined or could have feared; and he would regret that.

ABOUT THOMAS LIPPMAN:

Thomas W. Lippman is an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington. In four years as the Washington Post's Middle East bureau chief, three years as the Post's oil and energy reporter and a decade as the newspaper's national security and diplomatic correspondent, he traveled extensively to Saudi Arabia. He is the author of Arabian Knight: Colonel Bill Eddy USMC and the Rise of American Power in the Middle East, Inside the Mirage: America's Fragile Partnership with Saudi Arabia, Madeleine Albright and the New American Diplomacy, Understanding Islam, and Egypt After Nasser. A writer and journalist specializing in U.S. foreign policy and Middle Eastern affairs, he lives in Washington, DC.

THOMAS LIPPMAN ON SUSRIS:

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