MOROCCO COUNRY READER TABLE OF CONTENTS A ... - ADST

DUNCAN: Our political relations were very bad. The Algerians viewed us as not being friendly
to them. There were specific exceptions. I remember during the period that I was there that the
Algerians had always had a very warm feeling for President Kennedy because they felt that
Kennedy even earlier when he had been a Senator had been a very strong, vocal supporter of
independence for Algeria during the FrancoAlgerian War. As a consequence, they had retained
great esteem for President Kennedy' (Senator Kennedy) support for them. During the time that I
was there, Robert Kennedy came over to represent the family to dedicate a John F. Kennedy
Square which was done by the Algerian government in memory of him. That was an exception.
Generally, our political relations with Algeria were very stressed. Our political people really did
not have ready access to the government. It was sort of an alliance relationship. At the same time
that this was going on, our economic relations, which were basically private relations, were
really rather successful. We were running a very substantial trade surplus with the country. This
caused a tremendous amount of anguish for my French colleagues because, of course, the French
still had very substantial aid programs there and what not. So, the French were pouring money
into the country and were nevertheless running a substantial deficit because the Algerians, in
effect, were running a more and more rigid trade program. We, on the other hand, had lousy
political relations. We had excellent economic relations. In fact, if I look back over my whole
career (Thailand was an exception because we were having excellent economic relations there.),
if I had to say, of all the countries I served in, what was the country in which relations with the
Americans were politically the poorest, it would have been Algeria, but where the relations
proportionally speaking were excellent. So, I was lucky because while my contacts with the
government officials were limited because I didn't have that much need for it directly, all my
contacts for the most part were with the business community and what not. It was not a problem.
Q: What were the forms that American commerce was taking?
DUNCAN: The biggest American involvement in the country was in the oil and natural gas
business. Shortly after I arrived, Exxon, which had been exploring in the country, took the
decision to pull out. They had been a very big player in the country. The statement at the time
was they decided that they were in exploration mode and they hadn't uncovered. They had tried,
but hadn't gotten results that at least were satisfactory for them. Sinclair had been successful and
continued to operate there. That was the biggest American operation in the country. They
operated down in the Sahara and we had a chance to go down and visit their operation in the
Sahara Desert. That was the single biggest operation. A lot of the American subsidiaries that had
operated in Algeria had operated through their French subsidiaries because Algeria had been an
integral part of France. Caterpillar had a big operation there. But it was like the French
subsidiary of Caterpillar.
Q: Were there commercial disputes and problems that you got involved in?
DUNCAN: In terms of problems, we did have expropriation cases. We did have cases of
property that had been expropriated by an independent Algerian government. They were usually
individual cases. I was trying to remember if there were any major corporate expropriations. I
don't recall. Most of them were individual American citizens with property rights and things like
that that had been expropriated. We really did not make any progress on any of those questions.