Word: meas
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Britain moved first. Unhappy over Bedas' refusal to buy British Aircraft VC10s for Intra-owned Middle East Airlines (MEA), Whitehall pressured Kuwait into transferring funds away from Intra and into Britain to shore up the pound. Then the government of France, which owns 15% of MEA, covets the rest, and doesn't like pro-American Bedas in any case, blocked an Intra bid to build a seriously needed new European headquarters in Paris. Next Russia, always glad to oblige in such matters, had its Narodny Bank withdraw the $5,000,000 it had deposited with Intra. Narodny staffers...
...until his complicity in the 1944 plot to kill Hitler ended his career, then despite his claim to anti-Nazism, was convicted as a war criminal in Belgium but, granted an amnesty, left the country with this bitter entry in the customs book: "Ingrata Belgia, non possidebis ossa mea";* of a heart attack; in Nassau, West Germany...
This sort of mea culpa colloquy sounds at moments like a quartet of Paris cab drivers divvying up the honors from a four-way crash. But Enough Rope, despite one or two lapses in its logic, never loses its head en route to an ironic final twist...
...catch was that to the Lebanese, business means bartering, and bartering is both an art and an adventure. So MEA's chairman, Sheik Najib Alamuddin, proposed to the British that his company would make partial payment for the jets in the form of surplus Lebanese apples; this would work out very nicely for the sheik, who is himself one of Lebanon's biggest apple-growers. The British, however, did not like them apples. Another idea-forming a British Aircraft Corp. subsidiary that would lease the planes to the Lebanese-was dashed last week when the British government revoked...
...quickly saw that shaky MEA could not fly solo, first enlisted the help of Pan American, then of BOAC, and finally of Air France, which got a 30% share of the line last year when Middle East merged with Air Liban. Gradually he built up an organization, trained a staff and carefully picked efficient routes. Today Middle East has a predominantly modern fleet that includes 12 jet and turboprop planes for scheduled routes, six DC-3s and a DC-4 in reserve. Backed by Beirut's Intra Bank and its shrewd chairman, Yusuf Bedas (who owns a 55% share...