Word: dhahran
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Bases. The U.S. was having trouble renewing its lease on the Arabian air base at Dhahran-with Saudi Arabia's King Saud holding out for big new shipments of U.S. arms. State watched with apprehension Iceland's election campaign in which four of the five contending parties were boasting about how they intended to kick the U.S. out of its base at Keflavik...
Alsop pursued the contrasts to Dhahran, where Saudi Arabian workmen drew top pay as technicians at Aramco's vast refinery while some of their countrymen bought and sold slaves ($150 for an able-bodied man, $300 for a boy and $600 for a girl). Though he reported that King Saud was using his U.S. oil dollars to finance Arab nationalism's whole anti-Western drive-paying some $500,000 a month to politicians and editors in the Middle East-Alsop found him playing the role reluctantly, the captive of the movement centering in Egypt...
Next day, as State began to fill in the details, it appeared that the Saudi Arabians also had a strong argument. In June 1951, the U.S. undertook to sell the Saudis some military equipment, and also to train their army, in return for air base facilities at Dhahran. The U.S. was slow to fulfill its side of the bargain. Last April the Saudis specifically asked to buy 18 light tanks. Six months later the State Department approved the Saudi purchase. In the midst of the furor, Saudi Arabia's Ambassador Sheikh Abdullah Al-Khayyal pointed out that his country...
...clock one morning last fortnight, a young Palestinian Arab employed as a senior translator by the Arabian-American Oil Company in Dhahran, was awakened by a Saudi Arabian cop. "Here's the list," softly murmured the Saudi cop, handing over a bit of paper with 72 names scrawled upon it. The translator knew what was expected of him: to check off a new batch of "undesirable" Palestinian Arabs on Aramco's staff, slated for arrest and deportation by royal decree...
Aramco pays higher wages than anyone else in Saudi Arabia. In Dhahran, the company's headquarters town, an employee draws his living quarters according to seniority and job, not nationality. Aramco's Bedouin workers come off the desert and out of tents and go to live in air-conditioned houses. They have swimming pools hooded against the noonday sun and athletic fields floodlighted for night play. But as its Saudi employees learn to live more like Americans, Aramco itself becomes more Saudi. In its relations with the government and 53-year-old King Saud, Aramco maintains a policy...