Engineer Memoirs
McGiffert really had two sets of groups, the regional people and the functional people.
It wasn't always decided in advance which of these two groups would have the lead.
Whichever group had the lead, the other group supported them.
Typically, when they were making policy, the regional groups would have the lead and
the other people would provide them support in terms of what was practical. When they
had decided on what they were going to do, typically the action would be transferred
to one of the functional groups to carry it out. Then the regional group would monitor
progress. If there were political consequences from this, they would offer their views
as to what should and shouldn't be done.
For example, suppose we ran into some practical problem and couldn't deliver on what
had been agreed. Then you would have to get the regional group back in to figure out
how to change things. Having agreed with one of the foreign governments to do a
certain thing for a certain price at a certain time, if you ran into difficulties and weren't
able to do this, then the regional group was concerned about what that would do to our
relations with the recipient.
The airfield project was handed off. In the early days, when it came to making the
studies in the fall of '78, the regional group had the action. They were the ones with
whom Paul Hartung and his team worked.
Then about the time we came to negotiate this agreement for building the airfields,
McGiffert wanted to get me into it because he wanted somebody that had some
experience in building things. That's the reason he brought me in.
Q:
At that point, you had more than experience in building things. You had experience
with the Israelis as well.
A:
I was the best qualified guy that McGiffert had to work on this because I had done a
lot of negotiations of this type. I had done construction negotiation work before. I knew
quite a bit about airfields from my time in the NATO airfield program in SHAPE. I
knew a lot about airfields from that. Some of that was out of date. But most of it was
not. So I knew three sides of this program: the technical airfield side, the construction
management side, and the relationship with Israel side.
Q:
What's it like negotiating with the Israelis?
A:
They're quite gentlemanly about negotiation. But the Israelis pursue a better deal
vigorously. And they did in this case. However, apparently Weizman didn't want this
held up a long time over details. The offshore concept was Weizman's concept.
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