Sitting on the scorching seat, I waited for Derek Younge to wind a length of wire around the handle on the back door that frequently flew open when the car struck an unmarked construction hole. While the luggage was shifted one more time so the pesky door would close, I absently looked around Rainbow Villas. The flat-top metal prefabs were baking in the afternoon sun. On the sidewalk that divided the two rows of squat houses, Shelia Kingston was lugging another load of clothes to the wash house, fervently hoping that one of the washers might be working. Squealing children were weaving in and out of the fences that surrounded each of the units, stirring up the dirt with their rubber sandals. Joanne Ratcliffe was irrigating the hard earth around a struggling bougainvillea, the only bit of green that I could see.

Painfully, an acute sense of loss washed over me. I had spent two of the happiest years of my life among these people. We had wandered in and out of each other's houses as if they were our own. We had divided what little was available in the way of material goods. We had entertained each other with stories and games, shared our meals, our books, our sewing machines. Together we had survived in a primitive outpost wracked by the pains of change. And now I was going home, acutely aware of what I was losing and somehow knowing it could never be recaptured.

I felt another sense of loss. I had spent the height of the oil boom at the epicenter of events. I had occupied a front-row seat for one of the true dramas of the twentieth century. And now it was over.

When I arrived home, I found adjusting to normal life painfully difficult. Other than a press tour of Israel undertaken at the invitation of the Israeli government, I floated around, doing some political writing for a Georgia gubernatorial candidate, producing a political analysis of the Virgin Islands for a real estate firm whose client happened to be a Saudi sheikh, writing a number of background pieces on Saudi Arabia, and publishing an academic paper on the House of Saud. Meanwhile, I tried to follow events in Saudi Arabia from the sketchy reports filed by journalists on the typical seven-day tour of the kingdom escorted by officials of the Ministry of Information.

Life in Atlanta moved along. I eventually passed through a kind of reverse culture shock but still longed for the Middle East. After having spent two years treating an exotic array of diseases among a population barely touched by modern medicine, Dan was restless in a suburban medical practice. Although the hospital in Riyadh periodically asked Dan to come back, we had resisted, believing it was time to settle down. Then one Sunday morning in the spring of 1982, the telephone rang. It was the King Faisal Specialist Hospital, asking Dan once again to return. Maybe it was the time of year, but wanderlust irresistibly grabbed us. Throwing caution to the winds, Dan closed down his practice. I found a house sitter who would feed the dog, informed the school that Cohn would not be back, and excitedly packed our trunks to return to Saudi Arabia.

During my two-year absence, the oil boom had rolled along. In 1981, every second of every hour of every day, Saudi Arabia became $3,500 richer from its sale of crude oil. This amounted to $304 million a day, more than $100 billion a year. The price of oil, which was $28.82 a barrel when I left Saudi Arabia, reached $34 a barrel in October 1981. And the giant Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO) had become entirely Saudi owned, an estimated $2 billion exercise in nationalism.

But despite the general euphoria, small clouds were gathering on Saudi Arabia's horizon. While the House of Saud was still assessing the threat from the Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic revolution, the war between Iraq and Iran broke out on Saudi Arabia's doorstep in September 1981. To protect Western economies, where so much of its money was invested, Saudi Arabia pledged to up its production to cover Iraqi and Iranian oil lost to the war. In return, the United States sent four advanced-warning aircraft (AWACS) to patrol the kingdom's borders, * while the erratic Muammar Qaddafi joined the ayatollah in claiming that monarchy is incompatible with Islam and accused the Rouse of Saud of being a puppet of American interests in the Middle East.

On the oil front, the world's shortage of petroleum was disappearing. Throughout 1980 the demand for hydrocarbons was generally flat. Even as prices peaked in October 1981, Saudi production dropped from 9.6 million barrels per day (mbd) to 8.5 mbd, partly to protect the oil fields from overproduction but also to defend OPEC's benchmark price. By 1982 Saudi Arabia was absorbing much of the continued slump in demand for OPEC oil. Output was averaging less than 6 mbd, which, if it continued to fall, could threaten to cut Saudi Arabia's export revenues by as much as half. Still the House of Saud pumped money into the domestic economy, cushioning its subjects from the shock of the waning boom.

King Khalid died unexpectedly of a heart attack at his summer palace in Taif on June 14, 1982. Without conflict, Fahd became king, and Abdullah, despite the long-standing rumors that the "Sudairi Seven" would seek to deny him his place in the line of succession, became crown prince. As political instability in the Arabian Gulf escalated, the senior princes apparently were in no mood for infighting in the royal family.

The king's body was flown to Riyadh. Wrapped in a plain brown cloth, Khalid was placed on a simple litter and carried through the streets by his brothers, followed by government ministers and the common people. By Moslem law, he was buried before sunset, in an unmarked grave in an unkempt cemetery on the Mecca road not far from Abdul Aziz's old palace. Following three days of mourning, Fahd received the baya, the formal pledges of support from his family, the ulema, the tribes, the military, and thousands of Saudi citizens.

With Khalid's death, Saudi Arabia was seen as making the final transition from a desert sheikdom to a modern state. Khalid personified the old ways. Born in Riyadh in 1913, educated in the Koran by a palace tutor, Khalid was rooted in Saudi Arabia's traditional values. Like his father, he received his subjects almost every day, hearing the same petition: "Ya, Khalid, I have no money." Initially a reluctant ruler, he became interested in improving education, health care, and housing, direct needs of his people. His religious piety was never questioned, in spite of the charges made by the rebels at Mecca. And to reaffirm his roots, he drank camel's milk and hunted the kingdom's deserts with the tribesmen for weeks at a time.

*Saudi Arabia's request to purchase five AWACS at well as sixty F-15s was approved by the U.S. Congress on October28, 1981.

Fahd, on the other hand, brought to the monarchy his reputation as a worldly-wise progressive tied to the West. Although he made his appearances at the religious sites and undertook brief visits to the Bedouins in the desert, Fahd's reputation for enjoying worldly pleasures, his knowledge of English, his American-educated sons, his interest in pushing Saudi Arabia into the arena of international diplomacy, and his image as a technocrat committed to moving Saudi Arabia along the road of modernization overshadowed his attempts to fulfill the role of tribal sheikh. Fahd became king with neither the breadth of support enjoyed by Faisal nor the emotional ties between ruler and ruled nurtured by Khalid.

Nevertheless, Fahd began his reign in the tradition of his predecessors. He ordered the payment of one month's additional salary to all civil servants, military personnel, and people receiving annual grants or social security pensions. A gift of $4.4 million was made in his name to philanthropic societies all over the kingdom, and an additional $17.6 million was mandated for the construction and renovation of mosques.

The tall gates of Khalid's palace closed on his widow and the seat of power moved across the Diriyah road to the palace of Fahd. From the first days of his reign, Fahd let it be known that unlike his predecessors he would spend little time in the capital. Government moved between Taif and Jeddah, and except for Khalid's burial, Fahd did not make his first official visit to Riyadh until the end of November, three months after I arrived back in Riyadh.

When I walked into the Riyadh airport in July 1982, its order had a haunting quality about it. The throng of runty Yemenis garbed in turbans and skirts that had pushed and shoved as they swarmed over suit cases and tips was gone. The terminal was no longer an obstacle course of sleeping humanity spread across the floor waiting for flights to everywhere from Abha to Bangkok. The jam of battered and dusty taxicabs where drivers leaned on their horns and haggled over fares had vanished, replaced by sleek limousines with fixed rates. When I left the terminal, uniformed policemen sped traffic out onto Airport Road, which was now lined with stately palms and even more stately government buildings. This was only the beginning of the utter transformation Saudi Arabia and its capital had undergone in the two years since I had left.

In a remarkably short time, Saudi Arabia had achieved some of the substance as well as the veneer of development. Traffic, although still death defying, had gained some semblance of order. No longer were 97 percent of the beds in Shamaizy Hospital, Riyadh's largest general hospital, occupied by the victims of traffic accidents. Saudia, the national airline, was successfully forcing passengers to board planes Wahad y wahad ("one by one"), replacing the stampede of earlier days. The Arabian Cleaning Enterprise had removed 4.6 billion kilos of refuse and rubble, 16,000 abandoned cars, and 23,000 stray dogs from the streets. The first A&P supermarket had opened in the al-Azizia section, with an even newer Safeway down the street. And the public scribes who operate out of the alleyway across the street from the office of the governor of Riyadh now had typewriters.

Saudis no longer held menial jobs such as serving tea or driving trucks. They were now merchants, administrators, and bureaucrats. Even the soft drink vendor who used to work out of a packing-crate hut had a new grocery store with a wide plate-glass window. The change had been so fast that it was the norm and not the exception to see a young urbanized Bedouin whose father had herded goats ten years ago now carrying a briefcase.

The building boom continued unchecked. The tall steel cranes that depicted the landscape in every direction were still the national bird of Saudi Arabia. But the architectural style and quality of Riyadh's new buildings attested to a maturing of tastes and an appreciation of the aesthetic that was abysmally absent during the heady first days of the oil boom.

Shortages were gone and the city was now a vast international bazaar. Dior, Sony, Panasonic, General Motors, Rolls-Royce, Nike, and Adidas₅ were all there, hawking their wares to Saudis and expatriates alike. The clock tower and the main mosque were no longer the center of life in Riyadh, as affluent Saudis flocked instead into the temples of merchandise that had been built in the new suburbs. The

Euromarche, the French equivalent of K-Mart, and the expensive shops along Siteen Street had all pulled business away from Tamari and Wassir Streets, while the jungle of shops under the corrugated tin roof of my beloved Dirrah souq had burned to the ground.

Riyadh had lost much of the evasive charm that had made it such an interesting place to live. Chicken Street in Malaaz, location of dozens of vendors roasting chickens over open fires along the sidewalks, now had parking meters. But in the strongest statement of the new generation, the open pen behind the Toyota dealer was gone. No longer were Saudis trading in camels for pickups.

Unlike the makeshift housing I had lived in previously, the building we were now assigned to was the luxurious "low rise." It had been under construction when I left, eight of the ten stories of structural steel already up. Then a prince protested that the building would look over the wall of his house, so the ten-story high-rise was reduced to three stories sitting atop a massive base. General living conditions, in fact, had improved so much that the long-time residents lamented the passing of an era of survival without fresh milk, electric appliances, corn-fed beef, sneakers, and Pop Tarts.

The number of foreign workers had risen by a geometric progression. With so many different nationalities working in Saudi Arabia, a perverted English had become the sort of lingua franca. Even the Saudis had incorporated English into their own vocabulary. People hung up the telephone with "Halas, yellah, bye-bye ("I'm through talking, I'm leaving, good-by). "It's finished" universally meant "out of stock." But it was in the new road signs, somehow regarded as the symbol of a developed country, that the bilingual system was most evident. There was, "Don't hesitate [hesitate] to help an injured person. You may save a life," and "The Prophet Mohammed said to pick up offense is charity." Other signs urged safe driving: "It is dangerous to think or talk while driving"; "Traffic signal is a language to be learned;'; and "It is not allowed to carry more weight than prohibited." My particular favorite was, "Do not park here. If you do the air will be let out of your tires."

One of the major changes that had occurred in the everyday life of the expatriate was the government's inauguration of English-language television on the "Second Channel." It was a natural progression, for the history of radio and television in Saudi Arabia₁ reflects the history of the kingdom's struggle with modernization.

In deference to the standards of the powerful religious faction, radio in Abdul Aziz's time was little more than a broadcast of readings from the Koran. When Faisal became king, he undertook to expand the broadcast media for significant political reasons. In 1962, concerned about the divisiveness of tribalism, Faisal authorized the building of radio transmitters strong enough to reach all parts of the kingdom. Radio would become the instrument through which the House of Saud would foster greater domestic unity and a sense of nationalism.

Faisal then approached the issue of television. In the sometimes convoluted reasoning of religious politics in which the House of Saud engages, Faisal saw television as a way of preserving Saudi values. Refusing to recognize cinema as an innocent means of recreation, Faisal introduced television in 1965. Unlike movies, television was accept- able because its programming could be controlled by a government sensitive to religious values. Under Faisal '5 rule, the role of television was to reinforce the strict Wahhabi social norms. All locally produced shows were about Saudi culture and any imported films were carefully previewed and edited to ensure that they conformed to Saudi social standards. No religion other than Islam could be mentioned, and alcoholic beverages and open displays of affection between men and women were banned. "Both the images and words in the Saudi media reflected the ideas and attitudes of the majority of the society which the media served. . . . "* In all, the Saudi media during Faisal's era were carefully designed to be a force of conservatism, not change. With its strong emphasis on Saudi culture at the expense of foreign ideas, television had the same goal as radio: the building of national unity to overcome the obstacles of tribe and region.

In the end, Faisal died for his carefully controlled, conservatively cast television. When the first television station opened, Faisal's nephew, the religiously fanatical Khalid ibn Musaaid ibn Abdul Aziz, stormed the building with a group of protesters. Coaxed out of the station by the king's call for a meeting, Khalid ibn Musaaid was shot by a nervous Riyadh policeman as he stood shouting outside Faisal's palace. Ten years later, Khalid ibn Musaaid's brother would, in turn, kill Faisal to avenge his death.

The decision to launch an English-language channel was momentous, its reasons multifaceted. In part, it was an acknowledgment that the numbers of foreigners, both Western and non-Western, now working in the country needed some form of diversion. The regime was also alarmed by the number of Saudis using high antennas to pick up television from Egypt, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain as well as ARAMCO's English channel. Evidently the government chose to create its own devil rather than abdicate its viewers to foreign governments. Another reason was that the push to teach young Saudis English so they could join the work force demanded that they be exposed to as much English as possible. And overall, the Second Channel in its concept fit the progressive tone that Fahd's reign was committed to pursuing. The programs, which would be viewed by the more progressive elements in the society, would further educate the Saudis and modify their social attitudes. But like everything else, English-language television was defended on the grounds that it was a tool to promote Islam among the heretics working in Saudi Arabia.

* Willard A. Beling, ed., King Faisal and the Modernization of Saudi Arabia (London: Croom Helm, 1980), p. 136

To assuage religious leaders' objections to the revolutionary nature of the Second Channel, the House of Saud used its typical method: give with one hand and take away with the other. Before the Second Channel went on the air in August 1983, there was a period of especially strict enforcement of Islamic laws regarding Westerners and segregation of the sexes. Western women could find themselves hassled if they were not in abaayas and the matawain increasingly stopped cars with unmarried couples riding together to give them morality lectures.

After the initial phase of the Second Channel, the matawain were kept pacified by programming that conformed to the standards of family entertainment. A sample evening's schedule included readings from the Koran, cartoons, Little House on the Prairie, That's Incredible, the news, and a religious program called Islamic Horizons.

Lack of experience and personnel made locally produced programs amateurish. Nowhere was this amateurism more apparent than in news broadcasts. Stories were pulled directly off the satellite and broadcast in the language of the country where the event happened. On the same broadcast, there would be a report of floods in China delivered in Mandarin followed by a segment in French about a one-man glider made in Belgium.

But the main function of the local news is to showcase the royal family. Night after night, the first ten minutes of the broadcast concerns the activities of the king. "King Fahd ibn Abdul Aziz departed Jeddah today for Riyadh." This announcement is followed by a recitation of the list of dignitaries who saw him off at the airport. To the strains of a Viennese waltz on the sound track, the footage of men kissing the king unreels and unreels and unreels. The next story is always: "On his arrival in Riyadh, King Fahd ibn Abdul Aziz was met by . . ." followed by the same music and hundreds of feet of film of people greeting the king. On one broadcast, Fahd was shown in six greeting ceremonies, accompanied by the same waltz and consuming seventeen minutes of air time.

The other news often consists of such illuminating items as "The Council of Ministers met today and discussed several issues and took appropriate action, " followed by the sports news, which on this particular night was a British soccer match between Ipswich and Arsenal. Beheadings are announced as the last item on the Friday broadcasts.

The Second Channel has become an important tool for basic public education. In May 1984, for example, there was a driver safety week. Films on television taught what road signs mean, explained why a motorist should not park in the middle of the street while he goes shopping, and demonstrated what might happen if a driver enters a one-way street going the wrong way (a dummy graphically flew through the windshield in a head-on crash).

The foreign influence on the Second Channel is heavy because its shows are all foreign-produced. And in a sad commentary on Saudi attitudes about development, the Second Channel never gives Arabic lessons for foreigners and airs few programs about Arab culture. Somehow Saudi Arabia does not see its contact with the outside world as a two-way street of enlightenment for both the Saudis and their foreign employees.

*Newscast of November 11, 1983.

Television, both Arabic and English, has succeeded by chance and design to advance change in Saudi Arabia. Neil Armstrong's walk on the moon in 1969 captivated the Saudi public to such an extent that an entrepreneur opened a restaurant named "Apollo 14." International communications have forced Saudi Arabia to adapt to Greenwich Mean Time in place of the traditional Saudi system tied to the rising and setting of the sun. But the most calculated moves are in the area of social change, especially concerning attitudes toward women. In the infant days of Saudi television, women were forbidden to be seen or heard.* Later, non-Saudi actresses were seen primarily in melodramatic soap operas imported from Egypt. In 1967 a children's program narrated by a Saudi female aired and a girls high school was allowed to perform a short play. And then the conservatives complained so much that by 1968 all Saudi women had once again disappeared. But from the earliest broadcasts of the Second Channel, a woman announced the station breaks. She was never shown on screen, but the presence of a female voice was revolutionary. By 1984 Saudi families were appearing on local shows where they played parlor games such as musical chairs. I found it astounding to see an unveiled Saudi woman, her reputation protected by having her family clustered around her, dive for an empty chair and laugh uproariously if she won.

If the government chooses to push social change, it can use state- controlled radio and television as a powerful and persuasive means of communication. Prosperity plus the easy availability of inexpensive Japanese electronics has put a radio in every tent and a television in the home of everyone who has electricity. In the broadcast media, there is the potential to expand human resource development by integrating social change with education. But the media can help to create an atmosphere for innovation only by proceeding slowly while upholding the culture it intends to serve. As in all aspects of Saudi life, change is accepted only if it comes gradually and does not appear to challenge either the teachings of Islam or the culture's traditional values. No matter how innovative the broadcast media might want to be, they are caught, like the rest of society, between the pincers of modernization and tradition.

Regardless of the advent of English4anguage television and the other great changes branded with the symbols of the West that had occurred during my absence, many things about Saudi Arabia were still the same. My old boss, Tom Krogh, was back in Riyadh. This time he was untangling the problems of the eye hospital. In another construction fiasco, the air-conditioning equipment had been installed directly underneath the operating rooms and there was so much vibration that delicate eye surgery was impossible. Tom told me the interim solution was to chill the building down to about forty degrees, shut off the hospital's air-conditioning system, roll as many patients as possible into the operating rooms, and pray that the temperature inside did not rise above ninety-five degrees before the operations were complete.

*During the mid-1970's, a British woman who was in Saudi Arabia as a dependent read the English news. Her presence reflected the labor shortage, for she was replaced as soon as a man could be recruited.

And Saudi drivers were still so bad that when King Fahd's motorcade raced through the city, it was followed by a wrecker.

Although the Saudis obsessively shopped and purchased the products of the West, the great consumer society had yet to breach the walls of tradition. In one scene after another that greeted my return, I saw that the painful process of synthesizing the new with the old was still unsure. The ice cream truck with its brightly colored logos and tinkling bells that parked outside the posh new al-Karia mall maintained separate windows for men and women. The brightly lighted supermarkets with their wide aisles and imported foods sporadically posted signs in five languages warning female customers to keep "all limbs covered" while on the premises. In addition to combing the hot, dusty alley ways, the matawain with their camel whips now plied the air-conditioned shopping malls, forcing chic shops to close during prayer call. The Safeway store imported electric curling irons and then drew in a more modest neckline on the girl decorating the boxes. Foreign books were on the newsstands but the front of an Agatha Christie mystery was censored by blacking out a drawing of a woman's leg in fishnet stockings. And Jane Fonda, smiling from the front of her exercise book, had been put in sleeves and long pants by the stroke of an ink brush.

In spite of the large numbers of Westerners and the expanding length of time that they had been part of the scene in the kingdom, the Saudis had yet to accommodate to them. Rather, new attitudes toward Westerners had developed that made life more difficult. Increasing numbers of Saudis had taken up administrative jobs in previously all-Western companies as a result of the government's policy of Saudization. As these Saudis moved into the housing compounds of the large Western- managed companies, Saudi Arabia's problem of balancing its need for Western expertise and its need to defend the norms of its own society proved as difficult as it had always been. Westerners were no longer always totally segregated from the Saudis, allowing them to pursue their own lifestyles. There was a pervasive change in the attitude 'of many Saudis, particularly the educated. During the 1970s, no matter how strenuously the Westerners were confined to their compounds or how harshly the religious laws were enforced, the Saudis on a one-to-one basis cheerfully welcomed them. Now, following nearly a decade of a significant Western presence, the Westerners had ceased to be an interesting intrusion into the kingdom, who brought with them glittering promises of tomorrow. Instead, the Saudis harbored a nagging uncertainty about what Saudi Arabia had sacrificed in terms of its hallowed traditions to pursue economic development. To the Saudis, modernization had disrupted family life, corrupted the devout, and subjected the society to the disdain of its large Western work force. As a result, the Saudis developed a hostility toward Westerners that had not existed before. No longer were they willing to bend their own way of life to placate the Westerners. Instead, there was a growing attitude that the Westerners should be brought to heel.

In an attempt to accommodate both the Westerners and Middle Easterners living in the same compounds, swimming pools were segregated and in-house video systems purged of "nonfamily" tapes or shut down altogether. I walked into the employee cafeteria at the hospital one day to find it segregated by a solid wall into male and female sections. At the National Guard Hospital, the entire staff (doctors, nurses, technicians, support personnel, and their families) were confined to hospital property for several days after a Saudi guard saw a Western nurse caress her date. After the ban was lifted, men and women were not only forbidden to ride on the same hospital bus unless they were married but the single men and women were taken to different stores in town so there would be no danger of fraternizing while shopping.

In this atmosphere, it was not surprising that the Christian church once again came under intense scrutiny. It had been assumed that Fahd, as king, would lift the restrictions that had been clamped on the Christians after the Mecca uprising. But in January 1983, members of the governing board of the Riyadh Christian Fellowship were suddenly picked up and taken to the Ministry of Interior for lengthy interrogation and then released. In May, the Protestant minister Francis Gregory, John Farr, a founder of the Christian fellowship who had worked in Saudi Arabia since 1977, and all members of the board were rounded up, interrogated, and ordered out of the country within twenty-four hours. When they protested to Prince Naif, minister of Interior and the government's liaison with the Christians, about their expulsions in light of the fact that all of his instructions had been carefully followed, he simply replied, "The rules have changed."

The tense atmosphere between the Saudis and the Westerners that existed in Saudi Arabia when I returned made the job of reporting even more difficult. Most of the problems for any journalist working in Saudi Arabia arise from the character of censorship in the kingdom. It is different from the prototype censorship in the police states of tinhorn dictators or the institutionalized censorship of the Soviet Union. This censorship is nervous, expressing not so much repression as a great fear that somehow the Saudis will be embarrassed. There is a real sense that those in power control the media as much for the defense of Islam and the protection of Saudi honor as for their own political purposes. The Saudis have an acute sensitivity to how they as a people are perceived and how Islam is viewed by non-Moslems. When Saudi Arabia's Information Council proclaims, as it has consistently through the Iraq-Iran war (a war between two Islamic states), its need to keep a vigil on the mass media in view of the challenges the Moslem world is facing, its proclamation is accepted without question by the population. It is also understood, if not necessarily accepted, by Westerners sensitive to the central role Islam plays in the Saudis' self-perception.

But Westerners have difficulty comprehending the depth of Saudi apprehensions when events seen as acts of fate in the West are regarded by the Saudis as blotches on their honor. In my experience, the most clear-cut case of this phenomenon occurred in July 1979. For several weeks, there had been essentially no mail coming into Riyadh. The problem was not just mail coming from a particular country, which happened often as letters fell victim to one postal service or another; no one was receiving anything. Finally the news began to spread that the post office and two hundred thousand pieces of mail had gone up in flames, victims of a careless employee and a nearly nonexistent fire department. The disaster was never publicly acknowledged, since it was regarded somehow as an intolerable loss of face.

For perhaps the same reason, the scorching weather was seldom mentioned until the English-language Saudi Gazette finally began to publish the high and low temperatures for the kingdom in 1984. Even then, floods, wind storms, and record temperatures have continued to pass without comment.

Censorship in the kingdom falls in four areas: perceived attacks on Islam, violations of the Wahhabis' moral standards, direct or implied criticism of Saudi Arabia, and political commentary on the House of Saud.

Censorship of domestic publications is managed through government policy. Censorship of foreign material is managed by manual labor. Saudi Arabia employs hundreds of manual laborers from the Third World and arms them with brushes and ink pots to black out ads for alcohol or pictures of scantily clad women in imported magazines When the international news publications such as The Economist, Time, or Newsweek are late reaching the stands, it is a clear signal that they contain something that offends the Saudis or those in power. To stop the dissemination of objectionable stories, armies of laborers are mobilized to slash and tear publications, page by page. Consequently, many times I would be reading an article and turn to the next page to find myself in the middle of an entirely different subject. It then became a game to find out what was missing. Westerners leaving the country on vacation carry lists of magazines, dates, and page numbers of censored articles in order to report their contents back to their compatriots. Sometimes when the information arrives back, it is disappointing. I found out, for example, that some missing pages of Time contained only an article on the treatment of breast cancer. What had been objectionable to the Saudis was an anatomical drawing of a breast.

The suppression of news in Saudi Arabia is remarkably easy since there is no perceptible public pressure on the government for disclosure. This absence of the demand for the right to know reflects the culture as much as it does the repressive nature of censorship. In a society where the self-esteem of the individual and the privacy of the family are paramount, censorship is almost self-imposed. The Saudi press, for instance, would never print anything about the personal life of any member of the royal family, nor would the public expect it. Officials, from the king to clerks, are not expected to face public scrutiny. It would be an intolerable loss of face, a condition no Saudi imposes on another. Furthermore, unlike in Western culture, where communication is a virtue, in the Arab world, communication is a danger, a threat arising from prying outsiders. It is secrecy, not disclosure, that is the virtue. Security for the individual, group, and nation is thought to reside in unity behind stated values and ideals, not in the divisiveness created by a free press.

In addition to the cultural acceptance of censorship, the House of Saud has its own powerful political motives for keeping a lid on the press. In Saudi culture, only the strongest are accepted as rulers by their subjects. Leaders cannot be called into question and expect to continue to govern. In a population intolerant of human error, political survival depends not just on the suppression of opposition but on the concealment of the mistakes, minor sins, and foibles of various members of the royal family.

It was in this atmosphere that I reported on Saudi Arabia. A journalist in Saudi Arabia functions like no other. Western journalists accustomed to being haunted by every third man on the street seeking a platform for his views find in Saudi Arabia that information and opinion are shut up as if the kingdom were an oyster. Traditionally, reporting the news means reprinting government press handouts with no commentary. Confronted by a culture in which secrecy reigns in all matters and where Western journalists are not permitted entry, the only way a journalist can get a story is to be patient, assiduously filing away isolated facts and then patching those facts together until they begin to mean something. Since the Saudis' dedication to obscuring information is shared by all Arabs, the meetings of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) are a good example of what journalists are up against. There is a hierarchy of reporters who have followed the Saudi and other Arab oil ministers for years. At every meeting, after exhausting their contacts with the Sphinx-like delegates, reporters from competing newspapers cluster together, thumb through their note- books, and trade pieces of information, hoping to piece together coherent concepts from stray facts. What they come up with is similar to the New York Times interview with Sheikh Otaiba of Oman about a 1983 emergency session of the cartel. The sheikh slept through the first appointment, skipped the second, and finally sent a vague poem he had written about the meeting, which ended, "In verse I find a bountiful largess/ A great refuge at times of much distress."*

In Saudi Arabia, I found that a reporter's most valuable tools are a prodigious memory, keen intuition, and diligence. Whether I was at work, prowling the souqs, having dinner in a Saudi home, or talking to Westerners attached to ministries, embassies, or businesses, I ab sorbed every nuance and then I rushed home to write it all down. I broke this material down into subjects and filed it away with newspaper clippings, government documents, and other tidbits of information for future reference. These files allowed me to work but they also would be my downfall if they were ever found by the secret police.

* Quoted in Stuart Diamond, 'Reporter's Notebook: OPEC and Its vagaries," New York Times, November 3, 1984.

Anyone who risks being an underground journalist in Saudi Arabia lives with constant anxiety about being discovered. It was particularly important for me to recognize the repercussions if I were caught. I was the only reporter writing in-depth political articles on a regular basis and I was well aware that they had raised the hackles of those in power. Putting the writer of those articles out of action would be sweet revenge. A long prison term would not only punish me for my transgressions but would serve as an example to other writers who were in the kingdom ostensibly in other roles. Even if I were only deported, there was always the specter of spending several months to a year in jail waiting for the Saudis to make that decision. Therefore, a certain level of tension underlay my work. Periodically I got word from a contact in the Western diplomatic corps that the Ministry of the Interior was searching for "Michael Collins," my nom de plume. Hurriedly I would move all my files out of the compound and store them with close friends outside of Riyadh. Even in the best of times, nothing that could tie me to anything that had been published was kept or casually thrown away. My rough drafts and carbon paper stayed buried under the kitchen garbage until I took them to the desert to burn. I hid my stories until they could be sent out of the country by the "Pony Express"* Envelopes were either addressed to my agent, who sent them on, or, in the case of editors with whom I had a working relationship, they were simply addressed to a name and a street address. The only thing that distinguished these letters from the hundreds of others going out was that there was no return address on the envelope. In this net of deception, my most serious bouts of anxiety developed when an article I had written for an American publication surfaced, as they often did, in the expatriate community in Riyadh.

My particular problems were both helped and made enormously more complicated by the fact that I was a woman. The greatest drawback of being female was not being allowed to drive, and the second was that I stirred up an inordinate amount of attention every time I walked into a male enclave. On the other hand, I often could get more information than a man. Saudi men seldom think a woman is intelligent enough to be interested in business or politics and so are not on guard. Sometimes they would talk to me just to get rid of the threatening presence of a woman. And in the world of women, to which my sex gave me access, educated Saudi women would more readily discuss politics with me than men would with my male counterparts.

*There was a mail network among westerners at the hospital Anyone leaving on the direct Dhahran-New York flight took all the mail to North America. I left the kingdom on more than one occasion carrying an extra bag filled with nothing but letters.

Still, the role of journalist was difficult for anyone. Just collecting basic facts, which are at one's fingertips in the West, was a major undertaking. There were no public libraries. The library at the University of Riyadh was of little use since women were barred from the premises. (Female students requested books in writing, which were delivered to their own section of the school.) The libraries at the Western consulates were totally inadequate. Although the Ministry of Information made some effort at maintaining a selection of reference books, there were no newspaper files, guides to government documents, or even a partially complete collection of books published in and about Saudi Arabia.

Editors in the West, except the rare one who had some experience with the kingdom, had no appreciation of what it took to dig out the facts for a story. I gradually developed a small network that I worked with consistently, but in the beginning I found it wildly frustrating to bridge the chasm of ignorance. I remember when the participants the Mecca uprising were beheaded I wrote an article about the local implications in the government's public recognition that foreigners were involved in the revolt and the significance of the various execution sites that had been chosen. It was rejected by an editor who wanted a photograph of a victim's grave.

I was once working on a story about the General Organization of Social Insurance (GOSI), Saudi Arabia's social security system. The totally tax-free status of some expatriates ended when employers were directed to deduct 2 1/2 percent from the wages of all employees. As the economic crunch began to become apparent, there were strong suspicions among the expatriates that despite the regulations foreigners would never recover their contributions, either through withdrawal after they left employment in Saudi Arabia or as the pension promised to all expatriates after ten years' service in the kingdom. To even begin to tackle the subject, I needed the labor laws and the social insurance regulations that I assumed would be at the Ministry of Labor and the GOSI office. To get there, I first had to convince someone to drive me. Since I had been tutoring him in a correspondence course in freshman English, Ed Lane, one of the paramedics at the hospital, was more or less coerced into taking me. I donned my regulation long dress, and Ed and I started out at 8:30 A.M. on an incredibly hot summer day. Although Riyadh was always in a state of flux, at this particular time ministries, bureaus, and departments were moving all over town as many of the new government buildings under construction were completed. Our first stop was the Ministry of Information, to get an up dated map of Riyadh. I had been in Saudi Arabia long enough to know they were not going to have one, but I could always hope that this time it might be different. Of course, they didn't have one, but fortunately there was a young man behind the desk who had a vague idea of where the Ministry of Labor might be. In the Malaaz district there was a hideous pink-domed building that housed the Institute of Technical Training. According to his directions, the Ministry of Labor was somewhere nearby."

The usual route to Malaaz was closed because of construction so we wandered around trying to spot that pink dome until the gas tank was almost empty. We then spent the next fifteen minutes looking for a gas station. (For a major oil producer, Saudi Arabia has an absurdly small number of gas pumps.) While Ed was filling the tank, I glanced beyond the mound of rubble across the street and, to my delight, spotted the Ministry of Labor. It was now 9:35. Perspiration was pouring off me as I panted into the ministry and asked for a copy of the labor regulations. Why should I have believed the labor regulations would be at the Ministry of Labor? I was informed they were at the Ministry of Finance.

Armed with a new set of directions, we set off once again. When we arrived, the building that had been the Ministry of Finance was now the Real Estate Development Fund. By 10:30 I had finally located a relatively recent map of Riyadh. Driving toward what I believed to be the Ministry of Finance, we miraculously passed the GOSI building. I screamed for Ed to stop. Thinking things were finally going smoothly, I walked into the building and requested a copy of the GOSI regulations. The young Saudi sitting at the reception desk stiffened and nervously waved me upstairs, saying I would have to talk to the director. My antenna went up. The Saudis were obviously becoming suspicious of anyone asking questions about social insurance. I was right. The director was no fool and immediately exhibited intense interest in who I was and why I was asking questions. As Ed sat on a sofa and squirmed, the director quizzed me at length while I deftly avoided The revealing my name. Sinking into my helpless female act, always my repugnant defense of last resort, I spun a tale about my husband being in Riyadh looking at business prospects and since he was so busy he had thought it would be permissible for me to come for the information he needed on the kingdom's social insurance system and its application to foreign workers. Becoming apologetic, I said that being new to the kingdom perhaps I had overstepped the bounds of propriety. My story did not fly. Feeling increasingly trapped, I signaled to Ed and we beat a hasty retreat. By now it was 11:00. There was just enough time to get to the Ministry of Finance before the noon prayer call. More streets were torn up by construction, making the map all but useless. At last we were back on course, retraced our steps, and found the block where the map indicated the ministry was. Excitedly I saw building #1 as indicated on the map, next door was building #2, and building #3 should be the Ministry of Finance. Only there was no building #3, just an empty lot being leveled by a bulldozer. As I screamed with exasperation, I heard the allaha akbar of the prayer call waft over the landscape. Ed turned the car around and we went home.

In 1983 I was offered a job by Saudi Business, a weekly publication of the Saudi Research and Marketing group. Under the terms of the offer, I was to provide the magazine one article a week. For the magazine's part, I would be provided no transportation or transportation allowance, no leads, no introductions, and no press credentials, and if I found myself in trouble with irate government officials or the Ministry of Information, I was on my own. As far as the magazine was concerned, I did not exist.

In August 1983 my contact in a Western embassy passed word to me that the government was furious about an article I had written for the Christian Science Monitor about the deportation of Christians. He had information that the Ministry of Interior had launched an intensive search for Michael Collins. He implored me to get rid of my research material and to stop writing altogether. Shaken, I moved every note, clipping, and document out of my house and burrowed further underground for a while. But after a few weeks, I went back to writing. Michael Collins died rather suddenly, only to be resurrected as "Justin Coe."

Like television, newspapers and magazines in Saudi Arabia are undergoing their own, if less dramatic, set of changes. The print media are relatively new to the kingdom since there had been little need for newspapers in Saudi Arabia until the production of oil made its impact. Besides a low rate of literacy and little interest in the outside world, the small population was too widely dispersed to be reached even by the new technology known as radio. Following his unification of Saudi Arabia, Abdul Aziz recognized the need for a vehicle to promote national unity among his scattered population. Therefore, Umm al-Qura, the first newspaper, was started under his auspices in 1924. It remained the only publication in the entire country between 1925 and 1932. During World War II, the publication of Umm al-Qura and its few struggling competitors was suspended, and it was not until 1953 that the first daily, Bilad al-Saudiya, appeared.

There are now ten daily newspapers and nine weekly or monthly magazines published in Saudi Arabia, all privately owned and subsidized in varying degrees by the government. They represent a wide diversity of attitudes. The spectrum ranges from the English-language Saudi Gazette, which caters almost exclusively to Westerners, to the arch-conservative Al-Madinah, housed in a building in Jeddah that looks like a mosque. But all follow similar reporting policies. The main difference between the two English-language papers and the Arabic papers is the space devoted to religious topics and the tone of the coverage of Israel. The Arabic papers carry more stories speculating on the dastardliness of Israeli acts and motives and casts blame for all Middle East instability on the Jewish state. The other difference is price. The eight- to twelve-page Arabic-language papers cost SR 1 (32 cents); those in English SR 2 (64 cents).

The Saudi press is dominated by the philosophy of the late King Faisal. Faisal was more concerned with the government being on good terms with a press that he felt was loyal to Saudi principles and ideals than he was with controlling the press directly. Rather than making the press an organ for promoting the political goals of the regime, the Faisal government was more comfortable with a bland, politically pas sive press, "which would avoid controversial issues if necessary so as not to stir up society unnecessarily.* In 1962 Faisal created the Ministry of Information to encourage development of Saudi-style journalism and to deal with potential problems that might arise between the government and the press.

Today the press is not totally controlled by the government in the sense that every item printed must be approved by official censors.

* Beling, ed., King Faisal and the Modernization of Saudi Arabia, p.533.

Rather, the government licenses all book shops, video clubs, printing presses, and public relations agencies and supervises all advertising and publications "to insure that standards of taste and ethical practices are maintained." * With control of their existence, the government maintains a pact between the Ministry of Information and the publishers that sets guidelines. Editors patrol themselves, deferring to government judgment in questionable cases. From the viewpoint of the House of Saud, the system has worked well. Sometimes important news stories are downplayed or totally ignored by the media because editors know the government is not pleased by the events. For instance, both the coup that brought Muammar Qaddafi to power in Libya in 1969 and the Jordanian civil war in 1970 were hardly mentioned in the Saudi press. More currently, the rage of Shiism in the Moslem world is largely ignored.

Saudi newspapers are more noteworthy for what they do not say than what they do say. Lebanese journalist Salem Lozi once said, "The politician remains master of the statement he has not made and slave to the one he has made."** This could be the motto of the House of Saud, carried out by the Saudi press. Newspapers are more like bulletin boards of local and international events and reports on the comings and goings of the royal family than they are actual sources of information. An entire story can read, "The High Executive Committee on the Transfer Project of the Foreign Ministry and Embassies to Riyadh met here Sunday under Riyadh Governor Prince Salman, the chairman of the committee. It adopted a number of decisions." Or "The Minister of Information Ali Shaer has issued a number of decrees in Riyadh calling for punishment of video shop owners who violate instructions laid down by the ministry." And no opportunity to flatter the king is ignored. The Arab News, in editorial comments on King Fahd's speech at the King Abdul Aziz University, said, "What impressed the audience even more than his frankness, his eloquence, his knowledgeable comments and his spontaneity and his wit was his humbleness despite his exalted position."

*Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Ministry of Planning, Third Development Plan: 1400-1405 A.H., 1980-1985 A.0 (Riyadh, 1980), p.380.

**Quoted in David Holden and Richard Johns, The House of Saud (London. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1981). p.482.

Regardless of the controls, interesting things are happening in the Saudi press. After Fahd came to the throne, the newspapers became, if not a vehicle for social change, at least a platform for discussion. Sensitive issues such as the treatment of women, child brides, the plight of workers from underdeveloped countries, and even the competency of Saudi drivers regularly appeared in increasingly blunt and honest letters to the editor. Cartoons depicting people appeared, which in it self was revolutionary in a country governed by a religion that discourages representations of the human body. Furthermore, these cartoons were often used to make statements of social concern about the Saudi work ethic, the treatment of wives, the attitudes of taxi drivers, or the inefficiency of public service employees.

The other factor growing in the press was its attacks on the West. The size of the oil glut could almost be gauged by the level and variety of criticism of the West. The most common subject of editorials was Saudi Arabia's Herculean efforts in the defense of Islam, and the second was condemnation of the policies and practices of Western countries. The media has become an extension of the government's love- hate relationship with the West, particularly the United States. Ignoring a directive from King Fahd to downplay Western subjects in the press, the newspapers continue to run a wide range of stories about Western culture which they juxtapose against bitter anti-Western editorials. Much of this anti-Westernism is born of frustration with American policy toward Israel and Europe's inability to win something concrete for the Palestinians, but it says something more. It expresses the Saudis' confusion about how they want to deal with the West. While absorbing more and more Western products, ideas, and practices into their society, they have become more strident in their claims about the superiority of their own culture, a culture they assert the West does not understand. Without doubt, the West's view of Saudi Arabia is distorted. Yet much of this distortion is due to the absence of foreign journalists in the kingdom. The House of Saud has long had a deliberate policy of excluding foreigners, or at least keeping them at an acceptable distance, as a way to preserve traditional values and regulate the pace at which change proceeds. The same philosophy applies to foreign correspondents. While succeeding internally, the policy has left the world closed out, ignorant of the Saudis and their culture.

But the Saudis' view of the West is also distorted. Much of this is due to the media's unceasing drive to present the West in the worst possible light in order to defend Saudi Arabia's traditional values. Claiming that Westerners have warped ideas about Islam generally and Saudi Arabia particularly, the Saudis use their own press as a showcase for the worst in Western civilization. In the mainline newspapers, I read on a daily basis front page stories such as:

VIENNA - Pigeon-crazy man starves wife to feed birds.

Los ANGELES, CALIFORNIA - Former choirgirl sues seven priests for drawing her into sexual intercourse with the clerics.

KALAMAZOO, MICHIGAN - An heir to the Upjohn pharmaceutical fortune was sentenced Monday to a year in jail for sexually abusing his 14 year old stepdaughter and was ordered to take a drug made by his family's company that reduces sex drive.

ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN - U.S. slavery trial ends in conviction.

BRISSAC, FRANCE - A French chef whose baby daughter Valerie cried so much that it disturbed his television viewing killed her, cut her up, and fed her remains to his Alsatian dog.

My return to Saudi Arabia coincided with the beginning of the oil glut. In the economic downturn, the Saudis' fearfulness of the West and Western journalists became even more pronounced. With the oil boom waning, it became increasingly evident that the Saudis had yet to resolve their psychological conflict with the West. Saudi Arabia had made remarkable progress since I had first entered the kingdom in 1978. The basic infrastructure was in place. The educational system was drawing in a large percentage of both boys and girls. Health care was reaching out into rural areas that had never before had access to a doctor. Housing, running water, and electricity were available to most of the population. Saudis now read daily newspapers, supplementing the Koran as their only reading material. Sophisticated communications satellites connected the kingdom with the world and brought the world into Saudi homes via television. In less than a decade, the Saudis had moved out of isolation and ignorance to take a tenuous place in the twentieth century. So impressive were the changes that Saudi Arabia's advancement had to be measured in terms of generations.