Colonel Bill Eddy - America's Lawrence of Arabia?
economist.com
IF ANYONE could have been America’s Lawrence of Arabia it was Colonel William Eddy. He was born to Protestant missionaries in 1896 in Sidon, now part of Lebanon. Fluent in Arabic from a young age, Eddy was tailor-made to be the intermediary between an America which knew little of the Arabs and a desert kingdom whose oil and location made it a tempting prize.
Bill Eddy was from first to last a loyal Marine. Wounded in France in the first world war, he became an intelligence officer in Tangier in 1942-43 and helped prepare the ground for the Allied landing in north Africa. Soon he was named President Franklin Roosevelt’s emissary to King Abdel Aziz of Saudi Arabia, Prince Bandar’s grandfather (see article). In 1945 he shepherded the battle-scarred old king and his entourage to an historic meeting with FDR on a ship in the Suez canal.
Their arrival on the USS Murphy, writes Thomas Lippman, was “at once majestic and bizarre…On a deck covered with colourful carpets and shaded by an enormous tent of brown canvas, a large black-bearded man in Arab robes, his head-dress bound with golden cords, was seated on a gilded throne. Around him stood an entourage of fierce-looking, dark-skinned barefoot men in similar attire, each with a sword or dagger bound to his waist by a gold-encrusted belt. On the Murphy’s fantail, sheep grazed in a makeshift corral.”
With Colonel Eddy translating, the two leaders got on well. The Saudi king was pleased that Roosevelt promised to take no action on Palestine—where Britain was trying to hold the ring between Arabs and Jews—without first consulting the Arabs. Within weeks of the encounter, though, Roosevelt was dead. When his successor, Harry Truman, committed himself to the Zionist cause, the Saudi monarch felt betrayed.
Eddy, who shared the king’s anti-Zionist sentiments, resigned.Back in Washington, he became involved in the great post-war restructuring of American intelligence. When he returned in 1951 to Lebanon, the land of his birth, Eddy worked officially for Aramco, an oil company, and unofficially for the CIA.
Mr Lippman has a nose for the political nuances of the region and a good eye for detail. Noting that Saudis play chess without the bishop or the queen—for which they substitute an elephant and a vizier—he comments wryly: “No Christians or women were going to be checkmating any king in Abdel Aziz’s Saudi Arabia.”
Arabian Knight: Colonel Bill Eddy, USMC, and the Rise of American Power in the Middle East.
By Thomas W. Lippman.
Selwa Press; 317 pages; $25.95 and £17.50 |
