After returning to Denver from the first Riyadh trip, I swore I would never go back unless our organizational skills improved 1000% and someone actually had experience putting together an RFP was involved.
Then sometime in 1983, the phone rang again. Kuhlman & Yates were contacted about bidding for five Whittaker Hospitals in Saudi Arabia being put out for bid. The story behind this termination of Whittaker is a fascinating story of early Saudi business. Whittaker’s business came crashing down when their CEO and others expounded publicly on how much profit they were making off the Saudis. There’s a lot of background to this, but the fact was that the Minister of Defense & Aviation (MODA), Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz was not one to accept embarrassment for himself or his country and Whittaker was summarily dismissed.
This trip I was sent by myself. I always thought that was because I bitched so much on the first trip about how piss poor the planning was on our part. So, I was sent to Houston (IHS HQ) to meet with the staff there, and Mr. John Donnelly, who Yates had hired to consult on logistics and bid preparation. Donnelly was a wonderful gentleman and very down to earth. He had worked in government for years with the Department of Commerce, had international experience, and now had his own company.
So, we spent a few days going over the RFP and assigning duties and contact points for me for the three to four weeks I would be traveling. I was booked to fly business class from Houston to London to Riyadh. I would be met and transported to the Marriott and then would meet our new Saudi agent, Prince Abdullah bin Faisal bin Turki al Abdullah bin Saud.
On the morning I was to leave, we were meeting to discuss final details when Yates assistant came in and said I had an emergency phone call from my wife and I really needed to speak with her, “she’s crying.” My first, and only, thought was that something happened to my Son. When I got to the phone, the wife was sobbing and told me, “Larry committed suicide.” Before I could register that it wasn’t my brother, she told me he had shot himself in the head, in their new baby’s room, and his wife was beside herself. That’s when I realized that our next door neighbor was who she was talking about. They had moved into a new home in Centaur Village shortly after we did and were wonderful people. He had beach boy blond hair, and worked for the Federal Government. She was expecting their first child. They had a beautiful dog, Natasha. I remember Larry had cut a square out of their privacy fence and put in a piece of clear plastic so Natasha could see out. My wife did not want me to cancel the trip and come home, there was nothing to be done. The neighbor's Mom was coming to take care of her, and the police, et al., were handling everything else. So, with that on my mind, a few hours later I was off on a British Caledonia flight to Riyadh.
When I landed in Riyadh this time, it was in the brand new King Khalid International airport in Riyadh. It was amazing, so big and luxurious, which was nice; but the process of getting through customs was the same and the wait was the same. After clearing customs, I went out to the receiving area and found my guy with my name on his sign. This time he was middle-eastern (Palestinian) and his name was Nasser Bseiso, and he spoke very good English. Nasser would prove to be a godsend many times over.
Nasser was most congenial and drove me to the hotel, where he saw that I was checked in and we had tea and sweets. He had a schedule worked out and told me he would be picking me up the next morning for the bidders conference, then we would do some touring and later we would have supper and meet with Prince Abdullah. I was overwhelmed with the difference from our first trip and was feeling pretty good when I finally got to bed. I called my wife and she was much better, and I talked with my Son. I called the office and told them that so far I was very impressed and optimistic.
The next morning Nasser was there and we had breakfast in the hotel restaurant. He had my entire itinerary with him. Travel schedules to Jeddah, Khamis Mushayt (Abha) and Tabuk. While I would be traveling as part of a larger bidding group, he would be accompanying me to insure everything was taken care of. I also found out that he had family in Dallas, and owned a Dunkin’ Donuts shop there. His sons were there and taking care of things.
The day went well. We met people from MODA, and people from all the healthcare companies involved in bidding the project. This included the big ones, HCA, NME, AMI, IHG (UK), and other smaller ones. I remember thinking that they all looked different styles — HCA was well put together, well-dressed, and polished. NME was “Southern California”, casual, leather coats, etc. AMI was middle management, and IHG was…. well, British. It was a fun group and we all seemed to hit it off fairly well for a group that would be traveling together for the next couple of weeks.
That evening, I had dinner at Nasser’s house with his wife and some others I can’t remember. I was stunned at the amount of food on the table and left stuffed with a new found love for middle-Eastern food. This was the first of several meals I would have with them over the years to come.
After dinner, we went to Prince Abdullah’s office, which as I recall was on a pretty nondescript street in a nondescript building with minimal signage. We were escorted in to a waiting area, given tea, and shortly were escorted into Prince Abdullah bin Faisal bin Turki al Abdullah al Saud’s office. It was comfortable but by no means “Saudi gaudy”. He knew about me, and our organization, and was particularly fond of John Donelly whom he had met before. We spent a few evenings having tea and talking about the world and our respective countries. The Prince was a year younger than me, educated in Britain and a truly nice man, not self-absorbed or glitzy like a lot of them were then. He went on to become the head of the Royal Commission on Jubail and Yanbu; and up until 2004 he was Governor of the Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority. I spoke with him several times after that visit and saw him a few times while we lived there and he always remembered me.
I won’t ramble on with details of hospitals, etc., but will just highlight some memories. Khamis Mushayt & Abha were beautiful and in the mountains of Saudi Arabia. It wasn’t all traditional looking Saudis because there was a good number of Yemenis living there. We stayed at the Abha Intercontinental Hotel which was a 5-star hotel at the top of a hill in the middle of nowhere. The hospital facilities were lovely, well-managed and totally lost at the idea of being removed because Whittaker screwed up their contract. I remember all of us “bidders” spending time assuring the current staff that whatever happened there would be no whole scale replacement of staff or physicians. Transitions and opportunities would be process-driven and everyone would be considered for continued employment.
Jeddah was the most cosmopolitan city I could imagine for Saudi Arabia. It could have passed for any emerging large city with traffic and people. Facilities there were also excellent, and conversations were very similar.
Tabuk was memorable because that was pretty close to the Jordanian border and also connected to the Royal Saudi Air Force base. The hospital was well managed and seemed efficient. The thing I remember most is that they had the most well-developed Recreation Department I had seen anywhere. They had every thing on that campus and a marvelous in-house cable TV system. When I asked about it, the response was “there’s nothing out here but heat and desert, we need to make it a nice place for people to be.” I also remember hearing that, at one time, the Israeli Air Force has flown below the radar in Saudi air space and “bombed” the Saudi airbase with pig carcasses before the RSAF could scramble any jets to intercept them. A subtle Israeli message that I heard again years later.
I also remember that when we were in Tabuk, Nasser left me alone while he “had to do some business”. When he came back, he was carrying several posters of Yasser Arafat and other items he’d gotten during his “business”. I didn’t ask. Should have.
That visit was my awakening to the beauty of the Kingdom, and a 5 week immersion into its cultures and people. Each stop, each hospital, each city, opened new vistas of beauty and people, it was fascinating to me. As mentioned before this tour was where I came to know the people with HCA, NME and other big healthcare companies, and my future employment with HCA was initialized.
This was also the last time I would work a bid for IHS. After painstakingly gathering information and details of five hospitals and their existing infrastructures and challenges, and then transmitting it all back for inclusion into the RFP response. Then, at the last minute, realizing that no one “back there” had noticed that the bids had to be submitted in Arabic, arranged with Nasser to get them translated (and learning the difference between “translating” and “interpreting”), printed, bound, and shipped to me at the Marriott in Riyadh on the day before they were due. Then to get a phone call in the middle of the night asking me to see if I could get an extension on the bid submission because IHS couldn’t get the bid bond accomplished - which I did not do, thus finding myself with 20 copies of an RFP to dispose of. That’s when I knew my time with IHS was over.
Before I left, I had the opportunity to meet with the Prince again, and we debriefed on the process. In his most gentlemanly, Saudi, demeanor he expressed his empathy and understanding. We parted on good terms and he gave me a small ghuttra and ighal for my Son — and when I got home we took a picture of him wearing it and riding his big wheel, and sent it to the Prince. We kept in touch for several years after that, and I did see him again when I got to Riyadh with HCA. It was shortly after our last meeting that he was named Secretary General of the Royal Commission of Jubail and Yanbu, and he subsequently sent me a beautiful book on the project with a note and his card. In hindsight, I wish I had kept in better contact with him than I did, not so much for connecting to an important person, but because he was a nice person, and someone who could have been a good “penpal” over the years.
In 2015-17 he would become the Saudi Ambassador to the US.
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