890F.612/6–1645: Airgram
The Minister in Saudi Arabia ( Eddy ) to the Secretary of State
[Received July 2—4 p.m.]
A–53. Success of U.S. Agricultural Mission32 at Al Kharj is remarkable in spite of long delay in receiving their essential tools, equipment and transport. King Abdul Aziz is emphatic in his praise of personnel of Rogers Mission and of work accomplished already under great handicaps which included almost disastrous infestation by locusts.
Agricultural Mission has attracted favorable attention of everyone, and visitors to Arabia from various agencies commend mission and express anxiety that its permanence be assured, with expansion and plans to rotate personnel. Various independent proposals have been forwarded by these observers to Cairo or Washington, including the proposal that Sogers himself should soon visit the United States to recruit personnel to assure continuance of mission at end of 18-month contract period of which 9 months now passed.
The Legation concurs in the value placed upon work of mission, as reported frequently to the Department, and yields to no one in concern lest this most promising U.S. Government form of cooperation should not continue and grow. Rogers and two of his staff have just left Jidda after 11-day visit to collect and recondition motor vehicles and engineering equipment secured for them from U.S. Army Military Mission at Taif which concluded its work April 30, 1945. After repeatedly conferring with Rogers and the King, I recommend the following considerations be taken into account before acting on any specific proposals for enlargement or extension of Mission: [Page 908]
- (1)
- Plan for more permanent or larger mission must await availability of financial resources for development program in Saudi Arabia, before the dimensions of any more permanent U.S. Agricultural cooperation can be assessed. The longer future effort cannot be confined to a war budget or agency, but must be part of a national program planned with the King.
- (2)
- As soon as financial resources or long time loans permit, Rogers and other experts should propose to the King the agricultural program they recommend for a given period of years, together with estimate of personnel and equipment required. Rogers agreed to draft now his ideas and recommendations, and to seek an early audience with the King as soon as the finances are in sight.
- (3)
- The agricultural program must be one the King himself wants, not one devised at a distance and presented to him. The Mission at Al Kharj sets the pattern he wants: An enterprise of the Saudi Government, sponsored and protected by the King, with personnel ultimately responsible to him.
- In a memorandum of July 17, 1946, to the Director of the Office of Near Eastern and African Affairs (Henderson), Richard H. Sanger of the Division of Near Eastern Affairs stated that by the middle of 1945, irrigation ditches had been completed, pumps installed, and a variety of cereals, vegetables, folder crops, date palm and other fruit-bearing trees successfully grown on the 2,000-acre tract at Al Kharj (890F.61/7–1746).↩