Saddam Hussein’s army made a mess of Diebold’s vaults in Kuwait – but our doors and locks held tight.  They couldn’t break in. 

When I arrived, the entire place was a mess. There were sand bag bunkers all over where Saddam Hussein’s army would fire from. Buildings were gutted and burned. It was like a scene on television.

I was there to open five Diebold vaults containing Kuwaiti currency, dinars, that were damaged during the conflict. Because Hussein stole so much money, the Kuwaiti government was issuing new money. The new currency had to be printed in a short amount of time and the vaults had to be opened just as quickly – within a two-week timeframe.

But it wasn’t an easy task. Hussein’s army made a mess of these vaults. They took a torch to cut the combinations and hinges off. And we didn’t have any parts to repair them, so the government instructed us just to open them. So, we ended up pulling them through the wall and pushed them out on tires to open them.

After that, I only went back to Kuwait one other time. It was a lot different then, because everyone was working hard to clean it up and restore many of the buildings – but not all of them. Some of the branches that housed the vaults I’d opened years earlier never reopened. A lot of people were reluctant because they didn’t know if Hussein would come back again and repeat history.

In addition to Kuwait, I traveled to many other international locations during my 34-year career at Diebold. I began as an alarm installer in 1969 in New Orleans, La. A year later, I transferred to Jackson, Miss., and began vault installation. Then, in 1971, I moved to Little Rock, Ark., and four years later, made my first international trip to the United Arab Emirates. At the time, Diebold was not as global as it is now, but we did have distributors in international locations. What we didn’t have was the expertise internationally to conduct installations. That’s where I came in. I was the only installer who did physical security at the time.

Ninety-nine percent of our international customers were financial institutions – many of which were central banks. And most of the time, they used vaults to store money and gold. But, I did conduct an installation at a telephone company in the United Arab Emirates and at a museum in Costa Rica. This particular installation was interesting because it involved eight underground double vault doors. It was the only time I had to install this kind of vault door.