There has been a lot of talk in the last few days about the billions given to Egypt since President Anwar Sadat signed the peace agreement with Israel. I was serving in the Middle East at the time, and had completed a 4 year assignment in Damascus before going to Washington.

My stay in Washington would be short; after 1 year I was asked to go to Cairo in 1980 as Chief Engineer to work with the AID mission there. About a year after arriving, I watched live on Egyptian TV the assassination of President Sadat in 1981, when Vice President Mohammed Hosni Mubarak then became President of Eqypt.

The deal between Egypt and Israel included a U.S. commitment to give $1.5B a year to Israel. A matching amount was given to Egypt. Half would go to the Egyptian military, the other half for economic development assistance. My job would be to manage the development assistance portfolio.

You cannot spend large amounts of money by building maternity clinics or digging shallow wells in villages. We needed to obligate all that development assistance every year, to avoid losing the appropriation. We needed large expensive infrastructure projects costing $100M each. Power plants, industrial facilities, water/sewage treatment plants, highways. I had become somewhat of a specialist in doing that in India and Syria, so I was chosen to work up the Egyptian program.

It was an exciting and demanding activity and we had a large organization of very professional people in Cairo. Our work included large projects; several thermal electric power plants, the Suez cement plant, the Vessel Traffic Management System for the Suez Canal, Cairo Telecom, a grain terminal at Safaga on the Red Sea, Alexandria Water and Sewerage, Cairo Sewerage to name just some of them. We had $1.25B committed and being spent on water and sewerage projects, alone.

I mention all this to inform the reader that the development assistance funds, about half of the assistance to Egypt, were not going into Swiss banks for Hosni Mubarak.

I have no doubt that he was corrupt. It is almost a certainty that his replacement will be, too. It is a matter of degree. I learned long ago that power breeds corruption – it is an inescapable fact of human endeavor. In some places it is amateurish and visible; in others it is sophisticated, insidious and invisible. The public will accept a reasonable situation; cross the line and you can be overthrown.

In that regard be assured that the Israelis are just as human as anyone else.

For me, the Middle East and Egypt was a dream assignment; the high point of my field assignments with the agency.