An examination of the Morocco oil poisoning offers insight into the public health consequences of Cold War militarism, the culture of international hu-manitarian activities, and the politics of Moroccan nationalism soon after inde-pendence. In addition, the diplomatic archives concerning the epidemic also per-mit a historical case study in what has become known as “disaster diplomacy.”
Most such studies have focused on very recent disasters, related to weather and volcanic or seismic activity. The 1959 oil poisoning provides an opportunity to extend such investigations to the diplomacy of the Cold War and decolonization and to an overtly anthropogenic disaster.50
As Gaillard, Kelman, and Orillos have written, “scholars across the disci-plines have recently shown an increasing interest in ‘disaster diplomacy,’ which focuses on how and why disaster-related activities do and do not yield diplo-matic gains, looking mainly at disaster-related activities affecting diplomacy rather than the reverse.”51 This literature has aimed to illuminate the potentially positive effects of disaster response on relations between otherwise antagonistic states.52 The Morocco oil poisoning, however, suggests that a broader approach to the study of diplomacy and disaster is warranted. The oil poisoning involved semi-adversarial relations between allies and potential allies (the United States, France, and Morocco), and also involved non-state actors, including the Red Cross and the Istiqlal party. Furthermore, this case involves a complex reciproc-ity between the effects of diplomatic strategies on disaster relief and the effects of disaster relief on diplomatic activities. In post-independence Morocco, dip-lomatic concerns not only incentivized but also distorted and inhibited disaster response, as American fears of acknowledging culpability overshadowed the desire to make a show of American generosity to an emerging Cold War ally.
Furthermore, the examination of this tragedy also allows the historian to ex-plore how responses to one disaster can be intertwined with the experience and diplomacy of other disasters—in this case, the earthquake of 1960.
In 1959 and 1960, Moroccan, French, and American diplomats, as well as the Moroccan political opposition, were keenly aware of the potential impact of disaster responses on diplomacy, for good or for ill. For the Moroccan state,
the goal was to maximize aid from both the United States and France without offering concessions that would undermine the government’s nationalist cre-dentials or add credibility to the arguments of its domestic critics, most notably the Istiqlal party. For the United States, the explicit goals of disaster diplomacy were to promote the tenure of the American airbases in Morocco and to promote a positive image of the United States in comparison to the Soviet Union, its Cold War rival.53 French diplomats were likewise concerned about the future of French military bases and about international communism but also had broader goals of maintaining France’s influence in Morocco and preventing the United States from usurping this role. The Moroccan state proved adept at exploiting the anxieties and rivalries of its international benefactors.
American disaster assistance, like other forms of US humanitarian aid, con-stituted part of what Kenneth Osgood has called Eisenhower’s policy of “Total Cold War,” a means by which the “United States would wage the Cold War as-sertively through nonmilitary means in the political and psychological arenas.”54 Since 1958, when US military personnel had responded to floods and fires in Mo-rocco with search and rescue teams, the State Department had self-consciously sought to use disaster relief as a form of diplomacy to promote a positive image of the United States in Morocco. In June 1958, US airmen from Nousasser had re-sponded to a major fire in the Derb J’did bidonville (shantytown) in Casablanca.
In December 1958, US Navy and Air Force squadrons had provided emergency relief when floods struck the Gharb plain north of Rabat, distributing food and airlifting people to safety, feats the Americans would reprise when the Gharb was inundated again in January 1960. Among American officials, however, views were mixed as to whether such efforts produced satisfactory coverage of Ameri-can heroism in the MorocAmeri-can press.55
If the positive publicity generated by disaster response was sometimes under-whelming, the oil poisoning presented American officials with a looming public relations catastrophe: the specter of ten thousand disabled Moroccans living out their lives as permanent, visible symbols of American imperial harm. Would the Moroccan public, or the Moroccan political leadership, blame the Americans for that damage? By November 5, 1959, the American embassy received word that the US airbase was suspected to be the original source of the adulterating substance. This suspicion was soon confirmed after the Moroccan authorities requested samples of machine oils from the airbase, which the Americans pro-vided.56 At the request of Moroccan ambassador Ben Aboud in Washington, the State Department called upon the US Surgeon General to consult with Ameri-can experts on rehabilitation.57 As the weeks passed, the Moroccan government
made no official complaint but anxiously requested American assistance in re-sponding to the disaster.58
The Belgian WHO epidemiologist Alfred Tuyns told American diplomats that the Moroccan government was plagued by fatalism, a complaint also ex-pressed by the writers of Al-Istiqlal. According to Tuyns, the government shared the attitude of the victims that the affliction was an “Act of God”: “‘They are waiting to die,’ said Tuyns, ‘and one gets the feeling that the authorities share this attitude.’” Tuyns complained that, in the early weeks of the epidemic, the Moroccan government, although active enough in pursuing the perpetrators and confiscating bottled oil, was guilty of “criminal” sluggishness in request-ing aid from international agencies. This orientalist description of Moroccan passivity and fatalism was potentially reassuring to the Americans, who feared accusations of culpability but also suggested, to Embassy counselor David Nes, grave failings of the Moroccan state: “this account well illustrates the Moroccan Government’s deficiencies in any decision-making process.”59 Tuyns’s descrip-tion of Moroccan government passivity was contradicted, however, by Red Cross officials who stated that Moroccan officials were not blaming the United States for the incident but were “desperately anxious to hear what the US might be able to contribute” and were frustrated by the unwillingness of American orga-nizations to do more than send survey teams.60 Moroccan hopes for American unilateral assistance might explain the delay in requesting international aid that had frustrated Tuyns.61
The magnitude of Moroccan need for US assistance limited the adverse dip-lomatic impact of the tragedy for the United States. In addition to needing aid for the victims of the disaster, Morocco was heavily dependent on American economic aid, which totaled approximately $50 million in 1959, and the US had just begun to supply military assistance, valued at $30 million that year.62 The Moroccan government was also concerned that fears of adulterated oil in Mo-rocco would harm the country’s canned fish exports, and Moroccan officials hoped that the State Department would help to reassure “all interested agen-cies” (presumably the US Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Agriculture) that Moroccan canneries had not been affected.63 Hostility to the American presence in Morocco was a public force to which the Moroccan government had to be sensitive, but the government had no interest in inflam-ing anti-Americanism. As one US diplomatic dispatch stated, “Whether or not there was any exploitation of the situation from hostile sources, the Moroccan authorities would certainly do nothing to foster unfriendly feelings. As far as the US was concerned, they were entirely preoccupied with the hope that they
would be receiving some favorable notification regarding the prospects of equip-ment and personnel contributions very soon, in view of the desperate problem which the government faces.”64
The Moroccan government’s attitude was a relief for the American officials, who were also relieved that radio appeals for donations for the victims made by President Bourguiba of Tunisia made no mention of America’s role in supplying the adulterated oil. The Americans, however, never felt confident of Morocco’s loyalty to the United States or of Moroccan dependence on American aid. The fear that Morocco might turn to the Soviets as an alternative source of aid, in-cluding military aid, prevented US officials from taking Moroccan dependence for granted. Normally, this insecurity would have led to a generous American aid response.65
However, for American diplomats, the origin of the toxic oil in an Ameri-can airbase made the oil poisoning unlike other humanitarian crises in North Africa. The American response to the poisoning was restrained by the fear that American assistance might encourage the Moroccan public to associate the tragedy with the US military presence. The Nouasseur airbase willingly pro-vided oil samples to the Moroccan authorities for chemical analysis and donated twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth of surplus food supplies to the Red Crescent to assist with relief efforts, but otherwise, the US Air Force undertook to “re-spond only to specific Moroccan requests for assistance with a view to avoiding additional publicity and appearance of culpability.”66 The American Embassy did not declare an official disaster, and hoped that the WHO and the Red Cross would be able to respond adequately to the crisis.
American disaster diplomacy was also shaped by tensions between funding rules, which emphasized visibility, and publicity guidelines, which stressed sub-tlety. Ham-handed publicity about aid provided by the US might seem transpar-ently political and calculated, drawing attention to the bases while undermining the goodwill generated by the relief efforts themselves. Since the work of Edward Bernays in the 1920s, “public relations” had emerged as an endeavor which, to be successful, had to conceal its own deliberate efforts, and its authors.67 Eisen-hower had adopted this approach wholeheartedly: in the realm of Cold War psy-chological warfare, “the hand of government must be carefully concealed, and, in some cases I should say, wholly eliminated.”68 This approach was not universally accepted. For example, Leon Borden Blair, the Navy political liaison, ardently fa-vored more explicit publicity about the actions of US servicemen in relief efforts.
Looking back in his 1970 history/memoir of postwar Morocco, Blair scorned the civilian diplomats’ approach; Blair believed that the key to American relations
with Morocco had been the open presence of American servicemen (especially the Navy men at Port Lyautey Naval Air Station in Kenitra), not only in disaster relief but also in day-to-day interactions with Moroccans.69
Nevertheless, the policy of public relations subtlety and restraint, enunciated in Washington, had been reinforced in Morocco during the summer of 1959, when an American payment of $15 million dollars to the Moroccan government was attacked as a bribe in the Istiqlal press: “Does this mean that this amount is the price paid for the American bases in Morocco? . . . American dollars have sealed the lips and appeased the Moroccan Government, may God forgive it.”70 The lesson learned from this blowback was reflected in the instructions that USIS reporting on disaster aid in Morocco stress “mutual cooperation” rather than the heroism of Americans.71 American reluctance to draw attention to the US role in the oil crisis through overt generosity was clearly rooted in concerns about culpability, but such concerns were reinforced by the public relations prin-ciple that publicity (and disaster aid was in itself a kind of publicity) should not be obviously related to its political purpose. US policymakers believed that the provision of supplies or personnel directly from the US bases would seem like too transparent a diplomatic ploy in the aftermath of the oil poisoning.