In the summer of 1992, I made another of those
career decisions that many of my colleagues, laden as they are with conventional
wisdom, considered unwise. In the Foreign Service, we submit our request for
the next assignment, called a bid list, a year before the end of the current
assignment, and I was a year away from reassignment eligibility. I’d been told
by my career development officer (CDO) and others that as an administrative
career FSO I should concentrate on assignments in the administrative area
(general admin, finance, and general services). None of the available jobs
really interested me, but I dutifully prepared a list of some ten admin
positions worldwide and submitted it. And then, fate intervened.
The deputy chief of mission (DCM) at the embassy in
Freetown, Sierra Leone was requesting a curtailment of his tour. My CDO
recommended that I bid on that job. It was a grade 1 job, and I was an FS-02,
making it a stretch, but he said I had a slight chance. Sounded interesting,
and I’d never served in Africa, so I tossed my name into the hat. To my
surprise, my name made the short list of candidates.
Except for my CDO, no one – myself included –
thought I had a snowball’s chance in hell of getting the job. The ambassador at
the time, the late Lauralee Peters, interviewed those on the short list by
telephone. Imagine my surprise two weeks later when I was informed that she’d
selected me. In discussions with her later, she said she chose me because I was
administrative cone (cone is how the Foreign Service describes career fields
for officers – don’t ask me why) and she felt it balanced her experience as an
economic cone officer, and because of my military background, given that the
country was embroiled in a violent civil war and had just had a military coup.
Anyway, the wife and I had just packed our daughter
off to Georgetown – our son had entered University of Pennsylvania the year
before – I took the DCM course, and we flew off to Freetown, by way of
Amsterdam.
The embassy was small, 10 – 20 Americans and about
40 local staff, located in an old building in the downtown area near the
historic Cotton Tree, which was home to a huge colony of fruit bats, and
woefully underequipped for the situation. There was no political or economic
officer and the defense attaché was based in Monrovia, Liberia and got up to
see us two or three times during my three year tour. So, as the number two, in
addition to filling in for the ambassador when she was out of country and
supervising the embassy sections, I had to do the political reporting (the
country’s economy was in shambles, so there was no economic reporting), handle
the day-to-day military issues, which included supervising training for the
Sierra Leonean army and overseeing military construction projects (yes, we had
a few), as well as liaison with the local military, and I had to supervise the
Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance contractor we had in the embassy who ran
humanitarian aid programs (mostly feeding).
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| Meeting with Sierra Leone's first democratically elected president, Ahmed Tejan Kabbah, shortly after the elections. |
Even with a war going on, we found time at the
embassy to enjoy ourselves. We had an 18-foot Boston Whaler boat and would take
it out sometimes on weekend, to keep the engine tuned, but also to fish in the
Atlantic. Once, my wife and I went to a national park in the northwest of the
country where we followed a herd of hippos down a river in canoes.
A lot of my attention, though, was focused on the
military situation. Even though many in Washington, and Ambassador Peters
herself, didn’t think the country was ready for elections, I disagreed. I didn’t
think it was a call we should make. I followed my boss’s instructions, though,
and kept mum about it. As luck would have it, her tour ended, and she departed
several months before her successor, John Hirsch, was confirmed by the senate.
Left in charge, and with on one in Washington really paying attention, I began
working with the civilian groups, the UN, UK, Germany, and surprisingly the
Nigerians to pave the way for elections. This involved convincing the members
of the junta to step down. While the others were able to broker scholarships
and safe havens for these guys, it was my connection with them that allowed us
to discuss the subject with them. They agreed, and the process began to move
forward rather rapidly. Lucky for me, John Hirsch shared my views, and when he
arrived, gave my actions his full endorsement.
The elections came off, not without a few hiccups,
but rather peaceful, and the first democratically elected civilian president
took office. One incident a month or so before the election points out the
importance of personal contact in diplomacy. The junta had given me their promise
that they would stay out of the political process. Strasser’s mother, though,
had convinced him to make a run for president. The others on the junta took
this as breaking their word to me. One Saturday morning, one of the captains on
the group came to my apartment, saying he’d been sent by the junta’s number
two, Julius Maada Bio. He said they were going to keep their word to me, but
that meant that Strasser had to go. My plea was that they avoid violence, which
the captain said they would. So on Monday, Strasser was placed in handcuffs and
hustled off to Conakry, Guinea next door, and things got back on track.
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| Ambassador John Hirsch (c) and I meeting with Captain Valentine Strasser (l) who was head of the NPRC. |
Another benefit of my contact with the military was
that I visited the headquarters frequently, and was kept apprised of what they
were doing. I was even invited to travel around to their major headquarters in
the run-up to the elections to give a talk I’d prepared on ‘The role of the
military in democratic society.’ I was ferried from place to place in an old
Russian helicopter flown by a South African mercenary from a group called
Executive Outcomes that the government had hired to help them fight the RUF.
One of my pastimes was sitting on my balcony in the
evening with a shortwave radio and an antenna array I’d concocted, and
listening to RUF radio broadcasts. They spoke in a combination of English and
Krio, and had a rather simple code which I broke in a couple of days. In many
instances I had better knowledge of RUF plans and activities than the units in
contact with them.
It seemed like a strange world at the time; this was
way before Iraq and Afghanistan; but, in West Africa, it was the reality.
Shortly before my tour ended in 1996, things in Liberia deteriorated, and the
order came down to evacuate all Americans. Even with our civil war, Sierra
Leone was chosen as the intermediate staging base, with the American units
doing the evacuation based at Lungi Airport on the peninsula across the river
from Freetown. I was charge d’affaires at the time and the only person in the
embassy with any military experience, so I spent a lot of time at the airport
getting the military guys settled. I was actually in the control tower when the
first plane of army Special Forces guys from Europe landed.
I’d like to end this little tale with the story of
my final day in Freetown, or rather, the end of my tour. My wife and I took off
from Lungi on the evening flight to Amsterdam. The plane made a stop in Conakry
to pick up passengers. To my surprise, the exiled Valentine Strasser was five
rows behind me on the plane. He asked a flight attendant to ask me if he could
speak to me. I walked back to where he sat. He said he was on his way to London
via Amsterdam.
“I think I made a mistake,” he said. “Do you think
that will make it impossible for me to ever get a US visa?”
“I can’t say definitely,” I replied. “But, my advice
would be not to apply for one for a few years. Maybe in a few years’ time
people will have forgotten.”
He was visibly contrite, and explained to me that
his mother had convinced him to do what he did. What could I say? We shook
hands and I went back to my seat, and I never saw him again.
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