69. Memorandum From Harold H. Saunders of the National Security Council Staff to the President’s Special Assistant for National Security Affairs (Bundy)0
SUBJECT
- Policy Differences on Algeria
We’re marking time in Algeria until after the 2 September election—except for some fairly active relief work and Porter’s efforts behind the scenes. The Algerians themselves have asked us to refrain from establishing full diplomatic relations until they launch their new government.1 A major development aid program will have to wait until we see extent of Franco-Algerian cooperation and what the Algerians want.
We have mounted a good-sized relief program and a budding rehabilitation effort. Shipped or in the pipeline is about $30 million (CCC costs plus ocean freight) in PL 480 wheat and 11,000 large Army surplus tents. This week AID is signing off on a $11.5 million PL 480 Food-for-Work program to be administered by Church World Service and its French affiliate in a combined reforestation and farm rebuilding program around Constantine. A CARE-MEDICO surgical team has been working successfully for a month, and we will have ten mobile health [Page 100] units in Algiers by mid-September as an Independence Day gift. State plans a $5.3 million refugee resettlement program under the Refuge Act to meet the needs of the next few months until we can launch a formal aid program.
But even this relief activity reveals a sharp difference between State and AID approaches. State has generated almost all of it, although AID has cooperated in some of the staffing arrangements and has two of its refugee and PL 480 experts in Algiers. State believes we have to do some aggressive planning even before the Algerians are ready to launch a major development program. Latter don’t fully understand the complexities of development economics, and it will be up to us to provide what positive guidance we can. Hutchinson in AID, on the other hand, has taken a go-slow position on grounds that we don’t want to get deeply involved in a long range refugee relief effort, we don’t want the French to unload Algeria on us, and we can’t do any planning at all until the Algerians come to us with requests.
We have to clear the air on this basic policy question—should we be aggressively forthcoming or sit back and wait? We may have to wait until Algerian air clears to act, but we can’t afford to wait much longer to get AID and State on the same track. And we can’t wait much longer for the French lead. The Soviets won’t.