Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy: A Memoir

by Christopher R. Hill

  The American embassy remained the proverbial beacon of hope, one that assured Poland that we would never abandon their aspirations. Back in the States, Poland under martial law became a main theme in Ronald Reagan’s first term when the president uttered the expression “let Poland be Poland,” but it was a sentiment shared on both sides of America’s political divide. Trade unions, including the AFL-CIO, under Lane Kirkland, had embraced Solidarity, even though that Polish independent trade union was a political movement whose scope was far more than a trade union. The AFL-CIO kept Solidarity afloat financially and helped it maintain offices outside Poland, including in Brussels, Belgium, where the sometimes wobbly Europeans needed to be reminded that Poland was not giving up on its future as a free country.

  Our science attaché, John Zerolis, was arrested in early 1983 in a setup by the Polish security services for giving assistance to Solidarity (which consisted of U.S. magazine literature, including a copy of Newsweek) and summarily expelled from the country. When I saw John after he had returned to the States, his future was unclear as the department scrambled to find him a new assignment. His advice on dealing with the Polish communist security services was very clear. “Whatever you do, don’t look angry, because to some it will look like you are scared. Just smile, because in the end we are going to be proven right, and they will be shown to be wrong.”

  • • •

  Despite optimistic expressions of the inevitable triumph of freedom by Reagan, Kirkland, and, for that matter, John Zerolis, by 1985 I had had enough of dark and gray Eastern Europe. I looked forward to pivoting to an assignment in East Asia, in South Korea, where I served as an economic officer from 1985 to 1988. Korea’s future seemed as bright as Poland’s was dim, and I marveled at the energy and bustle of its people. On my arrival I met the U.S. ambassador, a courtly gentleman professor and political appointee from South Carolina named Richard Walker, who went by the name Dixie. In my first meeting with Dixie Walker he asked me to compare what I thought of authoritarian Korea under the current president, General Chun Doo-Hwan, and Poland under martial law and General Jaruzelski. “In a matter of a few years, Korea’s political system will be unrecognizable from what it is today. Korea is on its way to success, and nothing can stop it now,” I told him. As for Poland, “Ten years from now, perhaps a hundred years from now, Poland will be sadly the same.” If I had shown any wisdom in making the first prediction, I undermined myself in the second. Poland, in fact, was on its way as well.

  By 1987, South Korea was moving fast. Demonstrations broke out in Seoul, less than a year before the 1988 Summer Olympics were to get under way. The Olympics were not a catalyst for change in Korea, but neither were they irrelevant to it. As a Korean friend explained, “We don’t want the world to see us as a first-rate economy with a third-rate political system.” He continued, “If we are to be accepted into the ranks of important countries (if nothing else, Koreans believe in rankings), we need to have a real democracy.” I thought of the poor Poles, still mired with third-rate everything, and the fact that becoming a democracy was something that did not seem to depend on their aspirations alone.

  In 1988, I returned to the United States for an excursion tour as an aide to New York congressman Stephen Solarz. Solarz’s district was in Brooklyn, where he saw to the interests of a melting pot of hyphenated Americans, including those from Poland. His energy and enthusiasm were apparent in everything he did, especially traveling to distant countries and reporting back to those constituents who felt in Solarz they had someone who, like them, would not forget the old country. A year later I became the desk officer responsible for Poland. By the summer of 1989, Poland (only four years after my prediction to Ambassador Walker) was now the catalyst for a process that would sweep through Eastern Europe. Just before transferring to the department to take up my duties as the desk officer, I took a trip with Solarz to Yugoslavia, Poland, Hungary, and still-slumbering Czechoslovakia and East Germany. We met the pantheon of Solidarity figures who had been imprisoned when I served in Poland a few years before and who were now considering how to take over the government they had defeated in the June 1989 elections. I talked to Jacek Kuron, who had suffered in prison for many years but was now widely expected to be a member of a new noncommunist government, the first since World War II.

  “How did you organize the elections in such a short time?” I asked him, noting that the communists had hoped that the short time between agreeing to elections and election day would ensure them some seats and therefore some legitimacy.

  “Each candidate posed for a picture with Lech Walesa, which became each candidate’s campaign poster,” he explained.

  “That simple?”

  “Look,” Kuron replied. “If a cow had had a campaign picture with Walesa, the cow would have won, too.” How could I have ever bet against such people?

  Being a desk officer is a step up the policy ladder from serving in the Operations Center, but there is a lot to aspire to after that: deputy officer director, office director, deputy assistant secretary, principal deputy assistant secretary, and assistant secretary positions. But being responsible for the day-to-day relations with Poland that summer and for the two succeeding years was an extraordinary opportunity. Poland seemed like the center of the universe that year. Lech Walesa addressed a joint session of Congress, famously starting his speech with “ ‘We the People.’ As an electrician from Gdansk I believe I am empowered to use that phrase.” Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki made an official visit to the White House, preparations for which fell on the desk. I made several trips to Warsaw and Krakow during those two years, caught up with old friends from my time in Poland a few years before. They were now liberated from a system, as Czech president Vaclav Havel said at the time, “whose purpose no one can now understand.”

  I marveled at the changes that were under way. On a visit to Warsaw I witnessed the toppling of communist statues, including that of the first KGB director, a Pole named Felix Dzerzhinsky (who had a statue, so the communist-era joke went, because he had killed more Russians than any of his countrymen). I stood on the side of Dzerzhinsky Square with a junior officer from the embassy, together with many happy Poles, watching the construction crew remove the statue in what would soon regain its precommunist name of Bankers’ Square.

  The summer months in 1989 were a whirlwind of developments for Poland as I managed the day-to-day tasks in the department. With the Solidarity government set to formally take the reins of power in Warsaw, I got to my State Department office early that day to receive the first telegram reports (there were no live feeds) from our embassy in Warsaw about the speech to the parliament of the newly installed noncommunist leader of the government, Prime Minister Mazowiecki. At the start of his speech, he promptly fainted before he was revived to continue to describe the program this government was about to pursue to revive the country.

  Two weeks later, Deputy Prime Minister Leszek Balcerowicz visited Washington to enlist support for his radical efforts to transform the economy from a command-style communist model to a wide-open capitalist system. I had known Leszek from my days in Warsaw when he was just another brilliant Polish academic, one who like many others had long understood the dead end toward which Poland was limping. Now he was charged with a program of transformation that would be known as the Balcerowicz Plan (a name that he had no part in creating). I met him at the main Diplomatic Entrance of the State Department and chatted with him as we made our way up the elevator to the waiting room just outside then acting secretary Eagleburger’s office. Balcerowicz looked around at the oil paintings on the walls and asked who was in the largest portrait. “That’s George Marshall,” I explained. Balcerowicz then took a close look at the author of the Marshall Plan, the post–World War II economic program of assistance that had restored Europe. He stood back to take one more look and said softly, “A good omen.”

  Eagleburger greeted him warmly and made no secret that the United States was completely committed t
o the success of the new Polish government. As I watched Eagleburger’s performance art, I almost forgot my role as the note taker. I marveled at the way he turned a person he had never met before into a close friend.

  • • •

  A year and a half later, in April 1991, I accompanied newly elected Polish president Lech Walesa on a trip to the West Coast. The visits included a meeting with former president Ronald Reagan at his presidential library, which was still under construction. The two men laughed and joked throughout the lunch, with Walesa playing the role of the skeptic as to the completion date of the presidential library as he pondered the batts of insulation hanging exposed from the ceiling and the unconnected wires sticking out of walls. A piece of the Berlin Wall stood on the grounds and the photographers asked the two men to pretend to be pushing on it. I stood back to watch this odd scene, but I found myself nodding in approval, realizing there was something very real in what I had been watching.

  But by 1991 it was over. Eastern Europe, now redubbed by many Central Europe to highlight the fact that the Soviet Union’s western republics were themselves beginning to change, became quiescent, more interesting perhaps to work on than the Benelux countries, but increasingly similar. The adrenaline of the summer of 1989 was finally wearing off, and in looking for an overseas assignment I looked for a place that like Poland in the 1980s was beginning to stir. That country was Albania.

  One of the problems with accepting an assignment like Albania was how incomprehensible it is to people outside the service. “What did you do wrong?” was a common, only half-joking reaction. But I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to open a post that had been closed since 1946, when Albania became the North Korea of Europe. Sealed off from the rest of the continent for forty-five years, it had slipped into a dark age and become a country that time forgot. A brutal dictatorship had kept it out of Europe, and out of the mind’s eye.

  I arrived at the airport carrying two suitcases that included MREs (Meals, Ready [or not] to Eat) and a sleeping bag. Officials from the Albanian Foreign Ministry met me at planeside as a rusted tractor-drawn cart collected the luggage from the plane, and drove me to our “embassy,” located in room 215 of the Dajti Hotel. I checked into room 216. “The residence.” I was on my own that night, as I was many subsequent nights. I got to know my new post, learned how to communicate with Washington with unreliable phones and faxes, hired Albanians to help us get networked and established, and began to put together an embassy. We had an embassy building and compound, built in 1931, that we had handed over to the French in 1946 and later the Italians for safekeeping, and had given notice to our Italian tenants that we were to move in on October 1, 1991.

  Within a week of my arrival, I received a telephone call from Mother Teresa, who, unbeknownst to many, was an ethnic Albanian, and who was spending her summer establishing orphanages and a medical facility in Tirana. She asked if I would meet her at her office. I cupped the phone and asked our assistants whether it could be that I was really talking to Mother Teresa or was there someone else by that name and title in Tirana. I had learned not to be surprised by anything there.

  I met her in a sitting room of the villa she was using for her clinic with her New York–based assistant. Mother Teresa spoke softly but directly. She thanked me for the food assistance from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) that was to be given to the orphanages. She apologized for not having filled out all the forms, explaining that her main oversight indeed came from above, as she humorously pointed her finger up in the air. She asked if when we took back our embassy from the Italians, would we continue to store her medications for her clinic. I wasn’t going to be the first person in the world to say no to Mother Teresa, and so I promptly agreed. Her assistant interrupted to ask if we would build a new gate in the back of the compound. “We can talk about that,” I responded. I then asked Mother Teresa if she could do me the favor of meeting one of our transport planes bringing in food for Albanians and personally accept a pallet of canned products for her orphanage. She agreed.

  The next morning I went out to the airport and met the C-141, a large, four-engine jet, whose cargo was being unloaded. I explained to the crew chief, based in McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey, to expect a VIP. A few minutes later, a small white jeep pulled up to the plane. The aircraft crew stopped their activities and stared in disbelief as Mother Teresa, riding shotgun, slowly descended from the vehicle and approached the aircraft. All the crew members dropped to one knee in her presence. She went among them, giving small Virgin Mary medallions to each of them.

  The pilot, a diminutive woman in a flight suit, her red hair pulled back in a tight bun, invited her on board. Mother Teresa slowly climbed the three or four steps of the ladder, and on entering the aircraft looked at the enormous cargo bay, telling the pilot, “This plane is too big to fly.” The pilot assured her that was not the case, whereupon Mother Teresa said, “All the same, I will say a prayer.” She stood in the hatchway, clasped her hands together, and prayed silently. The rest of us, though somewhat less anxious about the plane’s capabilities, did the same. Never having seen anything quite like this in my life, and concerned whether anyone would ever believe me that this extraordinary moment which had many of us near tears had actually happened, I slowly backed out of the hatchway and took a picture from outside. The photo of Mother Teresa silhouetted in the hatchway of a MAC aircraft would later make its way from me to the USAID assistant administrator, Carol Adelman, to the office of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, and on to many offices and public areas of the Military Airlift Command. It symbolized, in 1991, a more gentle and optimistic moment for the United States, when there seemed to be no end to the capacity of our country to rise to the occasion.

  What I was doing in Tirana, Albania, many of my colleagues were doing over the vast regions of the former Soviet Union, now being divided into newly independent states. From 1990 until 1992 more than a dozen new embassies had been established in places where there was virtually no infrastructure; even getting to these newly created countries, with their newly created national airlines, could be a lifetime adventure. Using a tired cliché from more recent times, it would be called a “civilian surge.”

  But the Foreign Service pulled it off. We found people who were prepared to go to these places, more often than not without their families and without any other creature comforts. Tirana had two restaurants plus one on the back balcony of the Dajti Hotel. Dining out in Albania was a culinary adventure then, the dimensions of which were sometimes not known until the middle of the night.

  A few colleagues were to join us as the weeks rolled by, but the real company was in knowing that what may have been unique for me was typical for the Foreign Service. We got to know the Albanians, one by one, the way a good diplomat does. It is always about relationships, not transactions. My first visit with Deputy Prime Minister Gramoz Pashko was followed quickly by an invitation to his small home. He and his wife, Mimoza, welcomed me with everything they had, including a bottle of whiskey. Mimoza’s brother, the new finance minister in the transitional government, Genc Ruli, stopped by. They asked about America, but mainly told me about Albania and made me feel comfortable so far from my own home.

  At one point Gramoz took a music cassette from a shelf and before putting it in the tinny-sounding boom box asked, “Do you like Dire Straits?”

  “My favorite,” I replied.

  We had interpreters, Kestrina Budina and Andi Dervishi, who had been hired a couple of months before by temporary summer personnel we had in Tirana, and a consular officer FSO named Bill Ryerson. Bill set the U.S. standard for deeply and passionately caring about Albania, even learning the language in his spare time. Appropriately, because there was no one remotely as qualified, he went on to become our first ambassador. I became his number two, that is, deputy chief of mission, in charge of running the inside of the embassy while the ambassador performed the outreach. I found a language teacher,
Professor Ukë Buchpapai, to start teaching me survival Albanian. Meanwhile, I signed on many day laborers to help repair the embassy, Albanians who had somehow managed to learn some English from some source and could be useful as we moved into what was pretty much the skeletal remains of our embassy, built in 1931 and abandoned in 1946. One was Tony Muco, who showed up at the gate on the day we moved into our old embassy and said to me: “I need job. I will do anything. Work very hard. I good friend of Chris Hill.”

  “Funny,” I told him, “he never mentioned you to me.” I liked him instantly, invited him in, and put him to work. (Tony later rose to be the head of our local guard force.)

  Small teams of U.S. government experts in economic assistance, humanitarian aid workers, and other contractors came through the embassy. They provided enormous help to this fledgling little democracy, though unlike Iraq later, here the contractors never dominated embassy life. We helped the Albanians privatize the agriculture sector. We had people working in their ministries of finance, foreign trade, energy, and food distribution. The U.S. Department of Commerce sent out a team led by a seasoned commercial expert, Jay Burgess, with whom I had worked earlier. The International Republican Institute, led by a dynamic North Carolinian named M. C. Andrews, and Tom Melia from the National Democratic Institute provided technical assistance to political parties. Also, a distinguished but thoroughly down-to-earth senior judge from the federal bench in Manhattan, Judge Robert Sweet, assisted the Albanian court system. He helped introduce a totally new concept of a “procedures code.” The Albanian courts had heretofore been meting out death sentences and lengthy terms for the catch-all “agitation and propaganda,” but the new code would be the centerpiece of a new country based on the rule of law. Judge Sweet’s statuesque wife, Adele, a former newspaper publisher with a keen political sense, accompanied him, and we put her to work as well, advising Albania’s nascent media outlets.