The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2004

improve local health care. Doing that was a constant preoccupation, and I had not succeeded by the time I left. In fact, I don’t think it’s ever come to pass. FSJ : Was the problem getting institutions interested back in the States or there in the country? RP : It was both dimensions, and there were a lot of complications. For one thing, we didn’t have a bilateral agreement in place on cultural and educational exchanges, and you had to get that done first. And once we located an American consortium that was interested in doing this, some- where up in the north-central states, getting the Algerian side to cooperate was a problem. I think there was one brief exchange, and then the thing folded. Initiatives like that require constant attention from both sides, and if they don’t get it, they stop. Also, in contrast to Libya and Egypt and other states in the region — even during the break in relations, there were hundreds of Egyptian stu- dents in the U.S. — there had been almost no Algerian students here; just a handful. Algerians didn’t travel to the States. But that began to change almost immediately after restoration of relations. We were very surprised to have a long line of visa applicants, one of whom was a man named Elias Zerhouni, who is now director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health. One of my problems was that USIA wanted to close its office there, which it had operated at a modest level throughout the break in relations, because of the lack of response from the Algerians. So I said, send an Arabist to run it and let’s see what hap- pens. They brought in Chris Ross, and immediately things started moving on the informational and cultural side. FSJ : How was your return to Morocco as ambassador? I assume conditions there were not as difficult as in your other two ambassador- ships. RP : Oh yes. I liked the country and the people, and the U.S. and Morocco have had good relations for some 200 years. But even so, I didn’t want to go back there because of the way the king treated foreign ambas- sadors. He wanted them to be lackeys who played golf and went to parties and basically waited for him to tell them what to do. In addition, there had been two coup attempts when I was there before, and the king was never fully persuaded that we weren’t involved in them somehow. So I only lasted about six months. FSJ : Were you “PNG-ed” from there? RP : No, he said he would not declare me persona non grata, but declared that relations would not improve as long as I was there. He was upset because I was unable to relieve him of the [exiled Iranian] Shah [Pahlavi]’s presence, but his principal complaint about me seemed to be that I knew too many people. FSJ : Always a dangerous quality in a diplomat. RP : Yes, indeed. I was also PNG- ed, in effect, while serving in Egypt in 1967. President Nasser himself ordered my departure because he apparently thought I was the real CIA station chief and was personally responsible for all the bad things he thought the Americans had done to Egypt. The Egyptians later explained that they thought I had not acted like a diplomat. I’m not sure what that meant, but have taken it as an unin- tended compliment. Being PNG-ed twice is not a ser- vice record, however. I don’t know for sure, but the man who holds the record may have been James Leander Cathcart, who was one of the American prisoners in Algiers in 1785 and rose to prominence in the hierar- chy there. He was U.S. consul in Tunis at the time of the Tripolitanian War that began in 1801. And he was PNG-ed three times: in Tunisia, Algeria and Libya. This is obviously a subject that needs more research. By the way, he also lived for a time in Georgetown, on P Street. FSJ : It’s just a coincidence that you also live on that street, I take it? It’s not an homage? RP : Oh, no. I had no idea of that when we bought this house. FSJ : We’ve already touched on your time in Lebanon, but how much did the deteriorating security situa- tion affect your ability to do your job as ambassador? RP: We certainly had plenty of problems — constant fighting among the Lebanese militias, Israeli incur- sions and PLO infiltration along the southern border, and the invasion of 1978, plus an almost total absence of judicial activity. But that didn’t really inhibit our work very much; we had contact with everybody, and the com- mon danger generated a certain camaraderie among us all. But we did try to do something about the securi- ty situation, not for ourselves but for the country as a whole. One of the problems was that because of the State of Siege Law (which came about because of the movie starring Yves Montand that portrayed the U.S. as teaching the Uruguayan police how to torture and provoked Congress to pass a law limiting aid to foreign police forces), we couldn’t give a sin- gle bullet to the gendarmerie, the rural police force, which was an essential part of the security structure in Lebanon. It didn’t look very impressive to the outsider, but it was very influential in the countryside. One of my first assigned tasks after getting there was to try and arrange a ceasefire between the Chamounists and the PLO in southern Lebanon, J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 4 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 55