The United States has had a secret pledge since 1947 to protect Saudi Arabia from any attack, according to a television documentary to be aired next week.
The program, “The Secret Files: Washington, Israel and the Gulf,” also points out that at the same time, Washington has maintained its “special relationship” with Israel, which is second only to the ties between the United States and Britain.
The film, produced by the Washington Post and WETA-TV, Washington’s public broadcasting station, was previewed Tuesday at the Brookings Institution. It will be shown on public television stations nationwide next Monday night.
Narrated by Ben Bradlee, former editor of the Washington Post, the documentary attempts to show that formal, secret U.S. commitments to both Israel and Saudi Arabia led to the U.S. involvement in the Persian Gulf War a year ago.
The information was obtained from once-classified material in presidential libraries and the national archives.
Different perspectives of the same historical events are given by Amos Elon, an Israeli journalist, and Jamil Mroue, a Lebanese journalist.
The film is most explicit about the agreements with Saudi Arabia, which began in December 1947, less than a week after the United Nations agreed to the partition of Palestine.
Then King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud secretly promised President Harry Truman that he would not be drawn into a fight with the United States over Palestine, in return for U.S. military support.
BOMBERS FLEW IN 1963
The Saudi king then believed his country was threatened by the Hashemite kingdoms in Iraq and Jordan, an eerie augury of an alignment that would take place 45 years later.
He received a pledge from the United States that the United States would “take energetic measures to ward off” any aggression against Saudi Arabia.
Thus began the military buildup of the Saudis, who felt threatened in the 1960s by Egypt, after 1967 by Israel and in 1979 by Iran.
Operation Desert Shield was not the first time the United States acted on its pledge, according to the film. In 1963, President John Kennedy ordered U.S. fighter bombers to fly defensive missions along the Saudi-Yemeni border, after learning of a plot by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser to kill the Saudi royal family.
While the film points out Washington’s parallel commitments to both Saudi Arabia and Israel, differences in Washington’s relations with the two countries were discussed after the screening by Samuel Lewis, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel.
Lewis pointed out that “the secrecy has been all about Saudi Arabia,” whereas “the American public and the Congress have been remarkably aware of the degree of the U.S. commitment to Israel.”
Lewis also said the film made it appear that U.S. arms had helped establish Israel and enabled it to survive during all its subsequent wars, despite the fact that the United States did not become Israel’s major arms supplier until after the 1967 Six-Day War.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
