Baseless Concern

King Saud of Saudi Arabia gave no reasons, but his message was plain: as of April 1962, the U.S. would no longer be permitted to use its multimillion-dollar airbase at Dhahran on Saudi Arabia's east

# Left, New York's Governor Nelson Rockefeller; center, top-hatted James A. Farley; at St. Patrick's Day Parade in Manhattan. coast. On that date the 1957 agreement giving the U.S. Air Force the right to maintain the base will expire, and it would not be renewed, the King declared.

Hot, dusty Dhahran was built by the U.S. at the end of World War II, and improved since then to take the heaviest jets. It has been used by the U.S.A.F. mainly as a refueling and repair base. Under the agreement with the King, no U.S. combat aircraft could be stationed at Dhahran, and many other circumscriptions placed upon use of the base made its value questionable. Particularly nettling was Saudi Arab insistence that the Air Force must not station any Jewish airmen at Dhahran.

In the event of war, Dhahran might be useful as a place to refuel nuclear bombers or as a refuge for them after a mission, since it is a mere 850 air miles from the Soviet border. But a powerful clique of Saudi royal princes has been ceaselessly nagging the King to toss the U.S.A.F. out of Dhahran. The princes were eager to appease Nasser and other Arab nationalists who had used the King's sufferance of a U.S. base on Arab soil as an excuse for attacks on the Saudi royal family.

The State Department swallowed its surprise, mildly countered with an expression of hope for continued "close and friendly relations" with Saudi Arabia, and promised that, before leaving, the U.S. would finish the air terminal it has been building for the Arabians at a cost so far of $5,000,000. In fact, the U.S. is rapidly running out of airbases in the Arab world. After the three Strategic Air Command bomber bases in Morocco close, as agreed, in 1963, the U.S.'s only remaining base in the Arab world will be the $100 million installation at Wheelus Field, Libya.

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