Interviews
OUR MAN IN MOROCCO
Ambassador Thomas Riley brings Silicon Valley savvy to a country in transition in transition
Matthew B. Stannard
Sunday, March 27, 2005
When the phone rang and changed everything, Thomas Riley was in the office of his Mountain View startup. The caller was White House Personnel Chief Dina Powell. It was May 15, 2003.
"I've got some very good news for you," she said. "The president has decided to nominate you to serve as the next ambassador to Morocco."
Riley looked around at the whiteboards and cubicles, the cups of stale coffee and life-size cardboard cutouts of video game heroes that programmers had brought with them when they defected from Electronic Arts. It was a jarring scene to reconcile with the Arabian images his new offer prompted.
He heard Powell warn him against telling anyone -- he may have been a friend of the president's since business school, but until he was thoroughly vetted nobody was to know he was up for an embassy appointment. Then he hung up and tried to refocus his attention on a conversation about integrating Java coding into a gizmo that could take digital photographs and stream them wirelessly for insurance and real estate companies.
Less than 24 hours later, on May 16 -- before he was even able to track down his vacationing wife, Nancy, with the news -- everything changed again. A dozen suicide bombers detonated themselves across Morocco's teeming seaport of Casablanca. Riley watched CNN as the body count came in: 41 dead, including the bombers. More than 100 injured.
Overnight, Morocco had gone from being one of the only places in the world where Islamic tradition and Western modernity cheerfully coexisted, a country so open to both worlds that it had served as a host for Israeli and Palestinian negotiators, to looking like the next candidate for a collapse into religious extremism and hatred. As top government officials scrambled a team in Washington, D.C., to search for ways to keep that from happening, Riley sat in his Palo Alto home watching television with one thought going through his mind:
"I hope the president doesn't change his mind. I hope he doesn't think I'm not up for it. Because I'm ready to go."
Nine months later, in February 2004, with little more training than several weeks of intensive State Department classes and a stack of guidebooks could offer and little direction beyond his own ideals, Riley arrived in Morocco's capital of Rabat as U.S. ambassador extraordinaire and plenipotentiary to the kingdom of Morocco.
His task was simple: Represent the president of the United States and lead a staff of Foreign Service professionals as they tried to help Morocco halt creeping extremism and make itself a shining example of how a nation can succeed in cooperation with the West while maintaining an independent Islamic identity.
Last month, Riley sat down with a year's worth of old calendars to take stock of himself and his approach to that position -- bringing the perspective and energy of a Silicon Valley startup to the bureaucracy of an embassy on the edge of Africa, to use his own sense of California-style networking and dot-com business savvy to market an idea of America to the Arab world.
"The world that we're in right now, it's almost like we've come to a new kind of war with terrorism. There are no borders. There are no nationalities," Riley said in his quiet, slightly hoarse voice after a diplomatic function one warm Casablanca night.
"Where do we fly to, to fight this battle? The world. It's realizing we can't afford to let large segments of the population become disenfranchised," he said. "Morocco is not the No. 1 place for terrorism, but you've got to do what you can to fight back."
A framed photo of a young Riley in shaggy brown hair, mustache and red flannel shirt sits in an overlooked corner of the ambassador's official residence. He is sitting with three friends on a couch that screams 1975, the year he graduated from Harvard Business School. One can just see the edge of the cinder-block shelves, a coffee table made of old tires. One of the friends is a very, very young George W. Bush.
Harvard was a critical time in Riley's life. Before graduate school, he was well on his way to being a cog in some corporation's machine. A native of Atherton and Hillsborough whose father owned a successful precision tool company in San Francisco, as a young man he developed a penchant for making charts -- hours slept, hours worked, hours reading. He studied engineering at Stanford University, where he remembers telling an attractive young woman that his major life goal was landing a job with a good enough wage to support a family.
That was more or less exactly the kind of job he landed out of college --
as a "configuration manager" at Boeing, a job that entailed sitting at a desk identical to a thousand other desks and "keeping track of the rivets." His approach to his future was similarly systematic.
"I had an index card, and I had written down what must have been the first 20 years of my career," he said. "I was going to go to business school, then I was going to go to Corporation 1 for five years, then I was going to go to Corporation 2 for five years ... then I was going to have my own company. It was all worked out."
That changed in graduate school, where Riley discovered a kind of intellectual freedom he had never imagined -- and formed lasting personal connections.
George Bush and Riley became close friends at Harvard, going on double dates, playing together on Harvard's football team and spending so much time together that many assumed they were roommates.
Riley's memories of their friendship are remarkable only in their conventionality; he recalled fondly the time a clearly hero-struck Bush invited him over to listen to a tape of one of his father's speeches -- George H.W. Bush then was a special envoy to China -- and the time Bush reacted to a friend referring to Riley as "T" for Tom by declaring that Riley needed a nickname with more substance -- "like T-Bone."
For years the two stayed in touch -- Riley, a man of many acquaintances but few very close friends, included Bush in the latter list, each year sending him a birthday card. Bush went on to dabble in oil exploration and baseball; Riley strayed far from his index-card plan, taking an out-of-the- blue offer to join TRW Corp. in Europe for four years, then returning to California to co-found a company selling construction equipment in Africa.
His success allowed him to support his family along with his wife, Nancy, a polylingual tax attorney he married in 1977, and they were able to send their two daughters to college -- Julia, born in 1985, to Duke, and Aili, born in 1982, to USC.
Riley still had a little of the old cog in him -- his wife recalls a nurse's consternation when her husband offered a graph of her contractions at their daughter's birth -- but having reached the level of success he had aimed for in college, he discovered he still wasn't satisfied to just be part of a successful corporation. The world was changing.
"This is just when Apple was starting, the PC was happening, there were semiconductors. There was a kind of Silicon Valley," he said. "I had friends from Stanford, I had venture capitalists. ... It was crazy. I was selling roadbuilding equipment and the world was changing right outside my door, almost literally."
Riley plunged into the new world, founding and acting as CEO for a series of companies offering everything from automated building controls to Internet- based training to wireless photo delivery. He succeeded -- so much so that when Bush came back into his life, Riley was in a position to be of service.
They hadn't spoken for some time when Bush announced he was running for President, but Riley still dropped everything to help. He invested money in the campaign, and far more sweat equity -- raising enough to qualify him as a member of the "Pioneer Club" of $100,000-plus fund-raisers.
It wasn't really about politics, Riley said. The self-described "California Republican" conceded that aside from his preference for small government, many of his values (pro-choice, pro-gun control) are closer to those of the Democratic party. It was about friendship, the personal connection.
"Growing up in California ... politics is distant," he said. "To know somebody who you liked, who obviously I trusted and I respected, is going to run for president -- I just thought, I want to help."
It was at a California fund-raiser that Bush spotted Riley, calling him out with a quick, chipper, "T-Bone!" Bush had grayed, but looked much as he did in that Harvard photo. Riley wore glasses but no longer had the mustache, showing lines deepening around his mouth. But while his hair was pulling back a touch from his temples, it was thick, brown and wavy, and his wiry figure remained trim, thanks to Pacific Athletic Club and the occasional triathlon.
The old friends chatted briefly about the campaign. Then, as Bush turned to go, he made a startling farewell.
"OK, see you -- Mr. Ambassador," he said. Riley, recalling the moment, shrugged. "He may say that to 10,000 people, too; I don't know."
Bush was serious. Soon, the White House called and suggested Riley start thinking about where he might like to serve. True to form, he turned to a spreadsheet, listing candidate countries and sorting them by language, size, gross national product, importance to U.S. interests. One name kept bubbling to the top of the list, a nation he'd never seen, save on a brief vacation spent on beaches and in tourist districts: Morocco.
Dubbed "Villa America" by a vacationing Richard Nixon in 1982, the ambassador's official residence in Rabat is spacious and contemporary, with guest rooms, a restaurant-quality kitchen, a formal dining room and a backyard pool. In the living room, a picture Riley's daughter scribbled in childhood is tucked among abstract masterpieces from Bay Area galleries placed in the home by the State Department's Art in Embassies program. On a table near the picture lies a wooden board of a type used by Islamic students to write verses of the Koran; decades of writing and erasing have given it a polished sheen.
There are a chef and a butler and two liquor cabinets -- one for Riley's personal gatherings, which are paid for out of pocket, and one for official events where at least 51 percent of the attendees are Moroccan. Pay for the household staff is similarly divided.
One barely notices amid the opulence the unusually thick bedroom door, the windows covered with steel shutters, two radios tucked away in corners of the master bedroom. The leather seats and shiny black finish on the official BMW allow one to overlook doors almost too heavy to close with one hand, and windows thick and sealed. The home is lined with armed Moroccan guards who serve a dual purpose: to keep intruders out, and to keep Riley in. Or at least accompanied -- something he discovered when he received a firm talking-to after taking an unaccompanied jaunt to the embassy club with his wife. Since then, his bodyguards confide, they keep a careful eye on him, even sending a guard with him to his door to ensure he goes inside. It's a strange confinement for Riley, an athletic man who used to bike to work and at one point dabbled with auditioning for "Survivor" but who now must confine his workout to a treadmill. "I do sort of miss getting in the car -- getting in your own car -- and driving off whenever you want to, and going off and playing golf and going to the store or something like that. But not enough that it really makes a big difference," he said. "It's a wonderful life. I have no complaints at all."
When he finally was allowed to tell people about his new appointment, one of the first people Riley called was an old friend of his family: Shirley Temple Black, the former child movie star who went on to become a respected ambassador to Ghana and the United Nations. Riley asked her what the process of becoming an ambassador entailed.
"The process is very clear," she told him. "The president calls you, he tells you where you're going, and you say, 'Yes, sir.' "
It was an inspiring phrase that brought home to him that what he was embarking on was not a perk, but a chance to serve his country. But it didn't tell him much about what he would be doing. Some ambassadors become deeply involved with sending reports off to Washington, sharing information they gather at embassy functions. Some treat the post largely as a social responsibility, hosting functions and attending black-tie dinners. A few have been known to take monthslong golfing expeditions.
Riley fell back on what he knew.
His experimentation with bringing a Silicon Valley sensibility to Rabat began within weeks of his arrival, when he asked for a whiteboard to use in meetings. Nobody knew what he was talking about. Finally, they brought him a tiny dry-erase board, the size that hangs on a kitchen wall. This wasn't just a matter of office supplies, he realized -- it was a difference of business culture. In Silicon Valley, Riley had used whiteboards constantly, soliciting ideas from employees, tearing his own apart, conducting a form of management where the CEO's words were as subject to the will of an errant eraser as an intern's.
In Rabat, the culture was defined by the words, "Yes, Mr. Ambassador."
After a few months, he took action.
"I said, 'We're going to do an offsite.' I wanted to do a Steve Jobs- beach-T-shirt-motto-gifts-walk-through-the-forest-catch-each-other kind of thing -- without any of that stuff. But you can't do it in a conference room. " The event -- held in a hotel overlooking the Atlantic -- successfully transplanted a bit of Mountain View into Morocco. Embassy staff played along in their polo shirts as Riley put them through the paces: a quiz night where the answers were embarrassing personal tidbits gleaned from spouses. A briefing session where at the last minute Riley mixed members of departments to give one another presentations.
Did it work? Riley shrugged -- at the end of the day, nobody was going to say anything to him but "Yes, Mr. Ambassador." But embassy staffers said they liked the infusion of Silicon Valley informality and Riley's personal touches: the face cards he made of each staffer so he knew them by name when they arrived, the goofy poem he wrote and recited at the Christmas party.
More important, the embassy staffers said, Riley's California business background made him the right person at the right time in the right place: Morocco, at a time when it teetered between hope and disaster.
Casablanca -- "Caza" to the locals -- is home to the Hassan II Mosque, built with traditional handcrafted tile and filigree but on an astonishing scale: 25,000 can pray inside, 80,000 in the courtyard, and the minaret is 700 feet tall.
At midday on Friday, the holiest day for prayer, the mosque draws crowds of the faithful from across the city and beyond. Among them one recent day were two young women, each 18, old friends born in Casablanca -- who walked toward the mosque, giggling arm in arm over a private joke.
The two were similar enough to be mistaken as sisters. But while Marim Rouhi wore a long coat and a hijab wrap neatly covering her hair, Sadia Saifi's dark tresses hung below her collar, and her jacket stopped just below the belt line of her close-fitting jeans.
"It's not that I'm not faithful. I'm faithful. But I don't think [a scarf] is required in scripture," Saifi said.
Her friend disagreed. "I'm convinced I have to wear it, because it keeps people from looking," Rouhi said. "[But] people should be free to do what they want to do."
Saifi shrugged. "It's not an issue," she said. "Frankly, between us, we've never really talked about it."
For many Moroccans, that is the spirit of their nation: an easy tolerance, even within official bounds of religion and tradition. A common Moroccan saying is, "Nothing is permitted; everything is tolerated."
Perched at the northwest corner of Africa, the nation is in many ways the crossroads of the world, bridging Africa and Europe, ocean and desert, Atlantic and Mediterranean, East and West, Christianity and Islam, tradition and modernity.
Today, history has left Morocco a remarkable cultural stew, with streets offering French colonial villas and mosques with square minarets filled with people in both business suits and traditional hooded jebella robes speaking two, three, four or more languages -- Moroccan magazines have been known to show editorial cartoons where you must speak three languages to get the punch line.
There have been indications of unrest amid the tolerance. Embassy employees more than a decade ago were shocked to see thousands protest the first Gulf War -- thousands more protested the second. Surveys of Moroccans have found attitudes about the United States more similar to Saudi Arabia than to France, with more people describing Osama bin Laden as a popular world leader than Tony Blair or Bush.
And in the 2002 election, before the bombing, Moroccan voters shook the country's political structure by helping the Islamist Party of Justice and Democracy triple its representation in Morocco's parliament, giving it the third-largest block despite the party agreeing to a royal limit on its level of participation.
But many outside observers, and Moroccans, saw Morocco's changes more as expressions of dissatisfaction with U.S. policies than any genuine dislike for the West or support of terrorism.
They saw Morocco's ambivalence neatly summed up in a joke popular around the first Gulf War: The good news, the joke went, was that Morocco had developed a Scud missile that could hit the United States. The bad news was that the missile couldn't leave the ground because too many Moroccans were holding on for the ride.
Then came May 16, and the world discovered another Morocco that had opinions of its own.
The children's voices echoed off the concrete walls and dirt floor of their schoolhouse as they chanted lessons that would be important to them in coming life: first the alphabet, then the Koran. On the wall was an Arabic proverb: "He who teaches me a single word, I'll be his slave forever."
In May 2003, the building that now houses the "School of the Light" was a tiny, unregistered mosque. It was here that the bombers reportedly came the day before their deadly task to pray one last time.
They came from the nearby shantytown of Carriere Thomas, a warren of homes built over the decades out of concrete, sheet metal, scraps and garbage. The Moroccans call it a bidonville, for the cans -- bidon in French -- and plastic bottles sometimes used for siding and shingles.
Over the years, as rural Moroccans have fled drought-stricken villages in the hinterlands for the promise of work in the city, bidonvilles have sprung up around Casablanca, Rabat, Fez and Tangier. The larger ones, like Carriere Thomas, have tens of thousands of residents, with small shops, mosques and schools -- but often without water, sewage, transportation or hope.
The Moroccan government has recently embarked on a new program in the bidonvilles, upgrading some with water and electricity, straightening streets, establishing ownership of houses and demolishing the most rickety structures after reimbursing the owner. In others they are helping residents move to relatively modern Western-style apartment buildings built by the government.
But there are many bidonvilles and only so many resources. Carriere Thomas' streets are still filled with young men without hope, just like those who turned themselves into walking weapons that May. Nobody supported the violence -- at least not publicly. But many said they understood what had happened.
"Our sons are going mad because they have no jobs," said Kbira Kankouri, a mother of five sons ages 5 to 26. She called out her 24-year-old, a smiling young man, his body twisted into uselessness by a painful birth defect. Doctors have prescribed him a slew of medicines, Kankouri said, but just one - - carbamazepine, a specialized pain reliever -- is about 106 dirhams a box, or roughly $12 -- enough to feed her family for a week. "[My oldest son] tried to go illegally abroad, but they caught them and brought them back. We saw none of what the government promised. He has a computer degree but no job. They promised a house and we have no house," she said. In Spain, even an unskilled illegal laborer can earn enough in a day to pay for a week's worth of carbamazepine.
On the edge of Carriere Thomas, in a muddy no-man's-land of sheep, chickens and trash, Mourad Haimed remarked on how the fruitlessness of a job search in Morocco drove his brothers to Spain.
Thousands of Moroccans every year board rickety boats and try to cross the narrow Strait of Gibraltar, and hundreds die in the attempt. The constant flow led the monthly Parisian journal Le Monde Diplomatique to proclaim in 2002 that "Morocco is to Europe as Mexico is to the United States."
It's an apt comparison. A third of Morocco's population is younger than 15. Half of those older than 15 are illiterate, a rate even higher among women. Per capita income is roughly $1,200 per year, and 1 out of 5 urban Moroccans is unemployed. A similar number subsists on about $1 per day. Despite continuing reforms, Morocco's middle class is small compared with the privileged and the poor, and struggling with tax laws that leave them paying a disproportionate share.
Haimed, too, had tried to slip into Spain, but was caught en route. All they did, he said, was ship him back to Carriere Thomas -- punishment enough. Haimed was 25, the same age as many of the bombers, and he remembered them well. "They were like everybody else. We played football with them. They were friends with everybody," he said. "They all had an education, but they had no jobs."
He looked out across the muddy swath. "I have no answers," he said. "I keep thinking, but I have no answers."
Moroccans united after the bombings, holding mass rallies of defiance against fear and papering the walls with posters featuring the red hand of Fatima -- an ancient symbol to ward off the evil eye -- and the words "touchez pas ma pays": Don't touch my country.
But the rest of the world began looking to Morocco as a possible exporter of terrorism. Moroccans were suspected in the bombing of a Madrid train, in the assassination of a Dutch filmmaker and found among the foreign troops battling Americans in Fallujah in September. Some even recalled that Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker in the Sept. 11 attacks now awaiting trial, is Moroccan.
Their association with international terrorism frustrates and even offends many Moroccans, who are quick to note that in many of these cases, including Moussaoui, the alleged assailants were second- or third-generation immigrants who grew up in France, Spain or the Netherlands. Yet while many Moroccans insist the country has no history of fundamentalism or extremism -- save a brief dalliance with Saudi Wahhabism in the 1970s, when the hard-line Sunni sect was seen as an antidote to the political Shiism that rocked Iran -- a visit to the mosques of the working-class slums and bidonvilles outside the cities on the eve of the bombing found a different reality.
Reda El Abbadi, a former journalist for the Moroccan magazine Le Journal, had interviewed an up-and-coming young cleric who went by the name Abu Hafs about six months before the bombing.
An energetic and forceful man in his mid-20s, Abu Hafs met El Abbadi at his office on the outskirts of Fez, and for more than an hour bragged that since the Sept. 11 attacks his mosque was filled every Friday and his taped sermons sold as easily as those of any Wahhabi imam from Saudi Arabia. Abu Hafs called the Sept. 11 hijackers heroes and excoriated Moroccan imams and officials who sent condolences to the United States -- comments dangerously close to takfirism, a philosophy holding that Muslims who fail to participate in jihad are apostates. It is also a unifying principle of global radical Islam.
Abu Hafs himself was arrested shortly before the May 16 attacks for inciting violence; after the attacks he was convicted of being a spiritual leader of the terrorist cell and a link to al Qaeda and sentenced to 30 years in prison in Morocco. Thousands of other suspected Islamists were rounded up after May 16, many convicted, others allegedly tortured, drawing sharp criticism by international human rights groups.
Today, in the gritty neighborhoods where Abu Hafs preached, many men still wear the Pakistani-style baggy pants and long shirts favored by Moroccan fundamentalists who fought the war in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union. Few would speak with a Western reporter; those who did universally rejected the kind of violence used Sept. 11 and May 16. Residents of a bidonville in the area recalled with relief the sweeping arrests that followed the May 16 attacks.
"We were very uncomfortable when they were here," said Hachmi el Majdaoui, a 47-year-old farmer. "After what happened they disappeared overnight."
But that is no reassurance for Abbadi.
"They don't show up, but it's even more dangerous," he said. "There is nothing more dangerous than an Islamist without a beard."
The bombings were a wake-up call -- not only in Morocco," said Wayne Bush, the deputy chief of mission in Morocco. "They were also, I think, a wake- up call for Washington." A member of the Foreign Service since age 22, Bush is no relation to the president, as he has had to make clear on more than one occasion.
Bush is Riley's No. 2 man in Morocco, with broad organizational authority in the embassy. When Riley is out of the country, Bush assumes the ambassador's powers as charge d'affaires. With a life committed to the Foreign Service, Bush is always pleased to see a fellow career officer named ambassador, but he believes that as a political appointee Riley brings two traits to Morocco a Foreign Service officer wouldn't: a personal connection to the president -- critical in Moroccan culture, where such connections often mean more than a good resume -- and a business background that no Foreign Service officer could match.
Bush was named deputy chief of mission before Riley was named ambassador, and was in Washington, D.C., awaiting transfer to Rabat, when the May 16 bombing happened -- giving him a firsthand look at the American response to the crisis.
"Here was one of our allies in the region, a country that was ... moderate, tolerant, a country that has historically tried to play a constructive role in terms of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict," Bush said. "But here was terrorism appearing to take root even in Morocco."
Soon after the bombings, Bush was named to a State Department policy coordinating committee with representatives of the various government agencies, tasked to make recommendations to the department heads that advise the president.
Those recommendations were unprecedented in Bush's long experience. American military assistance to Morocco doubled. Economic cooperation quadrupled. In June, Morocco was named a major non-NATO ally; and in July Congress approved a free trade agreement with Morocco -- America's first with an African country. And in November, Morocco was the only Arab country invited to apply for Millennium Challenge Account funds, a multibillion dollar pot of U.S. aid designed to reward good governance in poor countries.
Morocco's government, too, reacted to the bombing, arresting thousands of suspected extremists -- but also accelerating the process of reforms it had begun in 1996.
Morocco now has a Justice and Reconciliation Commission, designed to compensate victims of past false arrests, headed by a former political prisoner. Women's rights improved dramatically under a January 2004 family law reform, and journalists in Morocco say their freedoms have expanded surprisingly -- while occasional arrests for criticizing the crown are still reported, one newspaper recently published the king's salary without consequences, and another even published a political cartoon featuring the monarch.
The actions on each side of the Atlantic pointed toward a single goal: to stabilize Morocco's business, social and government infrastructure to encourage foreign investment and allow Moroccan businesses to access the global market. The formula is one the State Department hopes can work broadly: stabilizing nations by offering potential extremists better social, political and economic opportunities.
In Morocco, it was the embassy's job to help Morocco turn the new flood of resources into opportunities.
The embassy plan is complex, but much of it can be summed up in two programs. One is the free trade agreement, approved by Morocco's parliament this past January and expected to take effect within a month, which eliminates tariffs on 95 percent of industrial and commercial goods. Moroccan officials hope it will open new export possibilities for products such as wine, handicrafts and olive oil while luring businesses with the promise of ready labor and access to the world's biggest markets; embassy staffers hope the requirements built into the agreement will stabilize Morocco's economy and help it comply with labor, environmental and anti-corruption laws.
The embassy is at the same time supporting microfinancing programs -- one of the hottest ideas in 21st century international aid. A typical microfinance program is operating in Douar Lhsasna, a tiny village on the outskirts of Casablanca. Like many rural areas, Lhsasna has struggled in recent years, as a series of droughts decimated unirrigated farmland, driving many to seek their fortunes in the bidonvilles or in Europe -- where U.S. and Moroccan officials say they can become disaffected and disenfranchised, easy recruits for criminal or terrorist organizations.
"Everyone who had the opportunity to get something in the city left," said Fatiha Bensaad, a 40-year-old mother of three. "Those of us who had nothing in the city stayed here."
With few options, Bensaad might have joined the migration. But three years ago, a Moroccan organization called the Zakoura Foundation organized her and some of her neighbors into a microfinance group and gave them small loans -- about $5 to start -- to be paid back with interest in a matter of weeks. The term was short, but with neighbors supporting one another, it was enough for Bensaad to buy a calf, raise it to maturity and sell it for meat.
Then she bought two calves. Now she has three -- and between them, her small but tidy home and her children, who help pick wool and feed the cows, she is content. And the bidonvilles no longer beckon.
"Life is never easy," she said. "They're helping us, and we appreciate it. We'll pay them back even if we starve."
It's not a universal solution, but it works here, say the residents of Lhsasna. And it works, say the Zakoura Foundation workers, in large part because of a grant from USAID, administered through the embassy.
But when asked, the residents of Lhsasna don't know that the foundation support is funded in large part by the United States. That's a problem, from the embassy's perspective. And that's where Riley comes back in.
As a businessman, Riley learned he mainly enjoyed two phases of a business: Starting a business, with all the exciting risk taking and strategizing that entails, and marketing a mature product, figuring out who needs it and how to make them aware it exists.
In Morocco, Riley found a company -- the embassy -- that already had developed a product: the package of programs and funds designed to help Morocco reach stability. It was a good product, even a great one. But Riley could see in his daily Arabic press briefings that their customers weren't buying.
"The stories are, 'Americans come in with their programs and try to force democracy down our throat.' 'They're coming in to take over the Middle East because they want our oil.' 'They don't respect our religion, they don't respect our people; they just want to expand, and they want to show their muscle,' " he said.
At the same time, the embassy needed to be discreet. What Riley saw as worthy programs, like last year's Forum for the Future conference in Rabat that brought many of the Arab world's leaders together to discuss economic cooperation and reform, could trigger huge street protests based strictly on U. S. support for the program.
Yet too much discretion, in Riley's eyes, was also a problem: He vividly recalled Moroccans thanking Abu Dhabi for tents shipped into the country after a devastating earthquake in 2003, not knowing that while the tents were marked Abu Dhabi, they had been purchased and shipped with U.S. funds. There must be a way, he thought, for the United States to get credit for its work.
"It's not to say, 'Oh, aren't we wonderful people'; it's really to help combat what is unfortunately a growing or certainly a strong anti-American image," he said. "If you don't say anything, it's just going to keep getting worse."
Riley's solution has been to be as visible as possible, as often as possible. That means going to other embassies' functions -- all of them, not just those of major American allies. His first was with Bangladesh's ambassador to Morocco, who still calls Riley one of the best ambassadors the United States has ever sent abroad.
It means some old-fashioned marketing know-how. In December, Riley helped arrange a $3 million USAID grant to Morocco to fight locusts infesting the south, the kind of basic support that would normally be handled behind closed doors by bureaucrats. But at Riley's suggestion, the grant was announced at a news conference featuring a multimedia presentation of ravaging locusts, during which the ambassador got to say some nice words congratulating Morocco for helping to fight a scourge affecting not only itself but also its neighbors.
The next day, Riley gleefully showed off newspapers repeating his pro- Moroccan comments -- under an oversize headline reading "American gift to support anti-locust fight in Morocco."
Maybe, Riley imagined, some young Moroccan out there might read that and wonder, "I just read an article that the United States is only here for oil. But if they're only here for the oil, why are they here for the locusts?"
"You're not going to change the world," he said. "But you can try to have a little balance out there."
As enjoyable as he finds them, those kinds of PR events are not what Riley considers his most important outreach. After all, as any marketer knows, selling to an audience who wants to buy your product is always easier than selling to somebody who doesn't.
One night, as his bombproof BMW rumbled through Casablanca after an event launching the American Chamber of Commerce's new Moroccan Investment Guide -- highlighted by a brief, upbeat speech from the ambassador -- Riley recounted what he considered to be one of his more important meetings in his first year.
It was fairly early on, he recalled, and he was reviewing a list of Moroccan political parties he had yet to meet when he noticed an omission -- the Party for Justice and Democracy, the Islamist party that stunned Morocco in the 2002 election. The explanation he received -- that the PJD was opposed to U.S. policies and so contact with them was generally held on a lower level -- didn't satisfy him.
"There are a lot of people here against our policies," he said. "There are a lot of people in the United States against our policies. But if I'm not going to be at physical risk or anything, why not?"
Ultimately, Riley met with several of the PJD's top leaders.
"I actually asked them, 'Has it been a long time since an American ambassador met with the PJD?' They said, 'Yes -- never.' I said, 'Wow, that is a long time.' "
Riley laughed at the memory of what came next.
"He said, 'First of all, I would like to tell you that we know you have your election coming up ... and we just want to tell you that all of us here at the PJD pray every day that your president will lose,' " he said. "I thought, 'Good, we're off to a good start -- nobody's holding back.'
"Ninety-eight percent of what was going to be accomplished was accomplished just by being there. The rest of it was saying, 'Yes, I'm willing to listen. I'd like to hear it. You're not going to convince me, and I'm not going to convince you of anything, but at least we've shown that we can sit down and talk, and I would like to listen and I would like to understand your point of view,' " Riley said. He gestured behind him, toward the hotel filled with American and Moroccan business leaders he had just addressed.
"This is kind of a friendly group here. These are people that are interested in doing business in the United States, and I certainly want to support that. But I value even more that ... meeting with the PJD," he said.
"Even though from a certain perspective you accomplished absolutely nothing... in a way I think it has more of an impact in terms of progressing what we're trying to do. Instead of having a good time with the people who agree with you, having not such a good time with people who don't agree with you. You probably make more progress."
In some ways the approach Riley and the embassy are taking -- increased economic aid on the macro and micro level, cultural exchange opportunities, and aggressive public relations -- is new, at least for a country like Morocco. Wayne Bush compares the level of activity in Morocco more to the level he saw working in Paris, one of the United States' largest and most important embassies, than in any of the Third World nations where he's served.
But in other ways, the level of activity is nothing new; it was status quo for past diplomacy. But with the end of the Cold War, government support for expensive public diplomacy declined as policymakers looked for a domestic "peace dividend." Funding for everything from consulate libraries to Fulbright scholarships declined after 1995, as did embassy staffing.
Support for, and interest in, the Foreign Service declined so much that in 1995 and 1997 the State Department did not even hold the exam.
Shortly after his arrival in Morocco, Bush recalled, he met with a Moroccan businessman who gave Bush a stern lecture on U.S. diplomatic strategy.
" 'You did what no business should do, which is you abandoned a winning strategy,' the businessman told Bush. 'You won the Cold War on the basis of outreach and presence and engagement and participation, and you won the hearts and minds of much of the world, and once you had won you withdrew. You dismantled these programs you used to run like exchange programs and university programs and speaking programs and libraries. You did away with a lot of that, and as a result you weren't prepared for the crisis that came here later in the Middle East.'
"There's a certain amount of truth in that," Bush said, and while the trend is beginning to reverse in Morocco and elsewhere -- in 2002 26,000 people took the Foreign Service exam, and 5,000 officers have been hired in the past four years -- "I think we still have a ways to go to make the headway we need to make."
Riley's office is filled with pictures -- historical shots above his desk of Churchill and Roosevelt meeting in Casablanca, modern pictures from President Bush scrawled almost illegibly with best wishes to "T-Bone."
And in one corner, where Riley can see it from his desk, is a framed photograph of Riley shaking hands with an anonymous Moroccan farmer. The farmer is a man Riley met in the Atlas Mountains. Where his neighbors' fields were withered with drought, the farmer's were lush with waving stalks of grain.
Riley asked about the man's success, and was told, through a translator, than decades ago the man had been part of a U.S.-backed program to bring hardy hybrid grain to Morocco. Nearly everyone had forgotten the program had ever even existed, but the farmer remembered, and decades later he was reaping the benefits.
"Sometimes, you don't see the results right away and you have to be patient. It's a window of 20 years," Riley said. "In some cases, you want things to happen right away -- in others you have to be patient."
Patience with America is something Morocco has had experience with. More than 200 years ago, it took the young democracy more than two years to recognize that Morocco -- before any other nation -- had recognized it as a new, independent country. When in 1789 President George Washington finally responded to that overture, he apologized for the delay in response, explaining that things had been a bit tumultuous -- what with a revolution and global war and whatnot -- and hoping the sultan would understand.
"Within our territories there are no mines either of Gold or Silver, and this young Nation, just recovering from the Waste and Desolation of a long war, has not, as yet, had time to acquire riches by agriculture and commerce," Washington wrote. "But our soil is bountiful, and our people industrious and we have reason to flatter ourselves that we shall gradually become useful to our friends."
Today, a copy of that handwritten letter hangs by the door on Riley's office wall in Rabat, where he pulls visitors aside and points out the promise from America's first president to the people of Morocco.
E-mail Matthew B. Stannard at mstannard@sfchronicle.com.
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