Introduction Excerpt by Thomas Lippman
Arabian Knight: Colonel Bill Eddy USMC and the Rise of American Power in the Middle East

"Bill Eddy was probably the nearest thing the United States has had to a Lawrence of Arabia."--Philip J. Baram, The Department of State in the Middle East. "In the development of America's relations with the Middle East the early missionaries played a unique role .. In terms of American awareness and knowledge of the area, the prime source of information has been -- until quite recently -- the missionaries who lived and traveled there and who learned the languages out of professional necessity. As late as World War II, the U.S. Government drew heavily on the experience of men of missionary background." -- David H. Finnie, Pioneers East: The Early American Experience in the Middle East.

Toward the middle of the twentieth century, two countries that were so unlike in history and custom as to be from different stages of civilization forged one of the world's least likely alliances. The United States, beacon of democracy, the richest nation on earth and a military and industrial superpower, joined forces with Saudi Arabia, an impoverished, remote and autocratic kingdom whose people were mostly illiterate, in a mutually beneficial economic and strategic arrangement that has shaped the development of the Arab world for seven decades and endures even now despite deep strains and innumerable challenges.

To those who value the unique relationship between the United States and the desert kingdom and to the many citizens of both countries who have profited from it, Eddy is a great unsung hero. He lived among Arabs from Morocco to Yemen. He knew and understood them like few other Americans, and was fluent in multiple dialects of their language. He respected their faith and their culture, and he foresaw with startling prescience many of the trends and ideas that would mark the troubled contemporary history of the Middle East. He was also a prominent member of the inter-agency U.S. government team that created the Central Intelligence Agency, never imagining it would become the reviled source of so much anti-American sentiment around the region.

At the time of William Alfred Eddy's birth in 1896, in Sidon, on the Mediterranean seacoast of what is now Lebanon, only a handful of Americans were living or doing business in the Arab world. Most of them, including Eddy's parents, were Protestant missionaries in Syria and Lebanon, then part of the Ottoman empire. They made few converts but their influence was widespread and durable as they brought education to generations of Syrian and Lebanese young people, created the American University of Beirut, and introduced such innovations as the sewing machine and the potato.

The official U.S. government presence in the region was negligible, as was American commercial activity. In 1906 the United States participated with 12 European nations in a conference in Spain designed to shore up French rule in Morocco against competing claims asserted by Germany. And in the aftermath of World War I, in which the United States participated and swung the outcome against Germany and its allies, President Woodrow Wilson personally took part in the negotiations over the remnants of the defeated Ottoman Empire and the disposition of its Arab territories. Aside from those events, Washington mostly kept its hands off the Arab and Muslim worlds.

Yet by the end of Eddy's eventful life, in 1962, the United States was the dominant strategic and economic power in the Middle East. The Ottoman Empire had died with World War I and the colonial empires of Britain and France were passing into history. The outside power that mattered most to the Arab world was the United States; its only rival for influence was the Soviet Union. For better or worse, the United States-through intervention in the 1956 Suez war, its support for Israel, its alliance with Saudi Arabia and preeminent role in the oil industry, its Cold War manipulation of regional politics, and strategic initiatives such as the Eisenhower Doctrine--had come to dominate the landscape.

To understand how and why that transformation came about, it is enlightening to retrace Eddy's career. He was an influential and sometimes crucial participant in many of the events that led the United States into its seemingly permanent entanglement in the Middle East. In others, he was a manipulator behind the scenes and a skillful bureaucratic agitator. Philip Baram's description of him as "probably the nearest thing the United States has had to a Lawrence of Arabia" perhaps romanticizes Eddy's achievements a bit, but it also captures Eddy's life as an American who believed in the Arabs, won their confidence, and forged enduring ties with them to the benefit of his country.

Far from seeing Muslims as hostile and inevitably coming into conflict with "the West," Eddy envisioned a grand rapprochement, a "moral alliance" of the monotheistic peoples of Christianity and Islam, such as he believed Richard Lion-Heart had forged with Saladin in the era of the Crusades.

This vision would never be fulfilled -- Cold War politics and the American alliance with Israel intervened -- yet even today, when U.S. policies in the Middle East have engendered anger and anti-American sentiment across the Arab world, there remains a deep reservoir of admiration and even affection for Americans and for American ideals. That this is so is attributable at least in part to the legacy of individual Americans who have worked respectfully alongside the Arabs to their mutual benefit for the past 75 years.

It has been unfashionable almost since the creation of Israel in 1948 to look back with admiration on Americans of the twentieth century who cultivated the Arabs and appreciated their way of life and way of thinking. In this age of terrorism, when Muslims in general and Arabs in particular inspire fear among ordinary Americans, esteem for the Arabs and their culture can seem almost unpatriotic. Yet the Americans who sought and nurtured strong ties with the Arabs were justifiably proud of their work, and who is to say how the world might be different today if their views had gained wider currency?

The list of these Americans, who forged relationships with the Arabs that transcended politics, is perhaps not as long as they and their Arab friends would wish, but is nonetheless substantial. It includes prominent people as well as Americans mostly unknown to the public. Not everyone would agree about who should be on this honorable roster, but certainly any such list would name Tom Barger, a pioneer of American oil development in Saudi Arabia and later chief executive of the Arabian American Oil Co., or ARAMCO; Steve Bechtel, the construction magnate; Malcolm Kerr, the scholar who gave his life to the American University of Beirut; the diplomats Parker Hart, Hermann Eilts and Talcott Seelye; General Richard Lawrence, the first American adviser to the Saudi Arabian National Guard; the academic and historian Bayard Dodge and much of the Dodge family; Mike Ameen, the gregarious oilman who was one of the first Americans to live in Riyadh; the journalist Wilton Wynn; the intelligence operative Ray Close; Karl Twitchell, the engineer whose explorations of Arabia peninsula laid the foundations for U.S. influence in Saudi Arabia and Yemen; Charles R. Crane, the plumbing fixtures heir whose fascination with the Middle East opened critical pathways of American influence; Dr. Louis Dame, the medical missionary who treated King Abdul Aziz and roamed the Arabian peninsula ministering to the medically desperate; and William Alfred Eddy.

These people led exotic, adventurous lives in far-off, mysterious and often dangerous places. The biography of any one of them would make an interesting story. This is Bill Eddy's.