The Congolese economy was fueled by oil. Huge reserves had been discovered off the coast of the southern city Point-Noire (Black Point), and the horizon was dotted with derricks of flaming natural gas. The oil business was controlled by the French state-owned Elf Aquitaine. Elf was a force unto itself. At times, it was even difficult to differentiate between the company and the French state, and indeed, as we later learned, a number of clandestine state activities were run through the company. More sinister, Elf also served to advance political parties’ interests, both in France and in Africa. A French journalist once told me that a good way to gauge when elections were going to be called either in France, or in an African nation with an Elf presence, was to watch the suitcases coming in and out of the Elf headquarters. If they were heavy coming in, it signaled that money was arriving to finance the election of the Elf favorite in the country. If they were heavy leaving, money was being repatriated to finance French elections.
Congo proved to be far more interesting than I had expected. I had recently remarried—my new wife was a Frenchwoman who had been raised in Africa and had returned there to work with the French Ministry of Cooperation, the equivalent of our USAID. We would spend weekends playing golf at the regional headquarters of the World Health Organization, where she worked. Afterward, sipping drinks at a riverside bar called les Rapides, right on the Congo River rapids just below the capital, we would watch an impromptu fashion show of young Congolese men and women sporting garb only they could wear. They called themselves Sapeurs, which stands for Societe des ambianceurs et personnes elegantes (the Society of Trendsetters and Elegant People). It was a movement that had sprung up in Kinshasa across the river, spearheaded by Congolese singer Papa Wemba. Picture men in zoot suits, fedoras, and spats, and women in boas and spike heels, parading back and forth on the banks of the Congo River and turning it into a fashion catwalk. That was the “la Sape” fashion movement.
Professionally, Brazzaville was very satisfying, though I got off to a rocky start there. Shortly after my arrival, on the eve of a visit to Washington by President Denis Sassou Nguesso, his foreign minister equated Zionism to Nazism in a speech at the United Nations. It was a more virulent formulation of the historic African comparison of Zionism to racism; there were few more offensive statements that he could have made. The uproar that ensued in Washington was bipartisan, full-throated, and fully justified. Already there had been little enthusiasm for a meeting in the Reagan administration between President Reagan and Sassou Nguesso. After all, in the halls of the State Department, Nguesso was referred to as the “Marxist-Leninist devotee of Afrique-Asie” (a left-leaning French-language magazine on Africa). The only reason a meeting with Reagan was even entertained was because Sassou Nguesso had recently been elected head of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), and it was protocol for the president to receive the heads of the regional organizations.
After the debacle at the United Nations, at the embassy we were told by a deputy assistant secretary for Africa that a significant gesture was required to put the visit back on track, and it would have to be something like the firing of the foreign minister, who just happened to be the president’s uncle. Nothing short of that would ensure that Reagan would see Sassou Nguesso.
I was dispatched by our ambassador to convey the bad news to the Congolese president’s chief of staff. In the car en route, I thought about how I was going to phrase it. I came up with a formulation along the lines of “Far be it from me to tell you how to handle the internal affairs of your country, but I will say that my government would not be displeased if you removed your foreign minister from his position.” Predictably, as I learned later, the chief of staff reported to the president, and later to a cabinet meeting, that I had insisted they fire the foreign minister. The discussion then turned to declaring me persona non grata—diplo-speak for kicking me out of the country. But Sassou Nguesso correctly understood that such an action would only make his problems with us worse and that I was too small a fry to waste the gesture on. Several months later, when our relations had improved, I asked that he read the memorandum of my conversation with his chief of staff. It had been prepared by a staff member of his who’d been at the meeting. Nguesso did read the document, and word was sent back to me that it confirmed my version of events. We have remained friendly ever since.
Nguesso’s trip to Washington was anticlimactic. He was not received by the president, who instead made a phone call to him in his room at the Willard Hotel, a block away from the White House. The Congolese president commented wryly about the exchange to intimates: “It would have taken no longer for us to have gone across the street to meet him than it took to talk on the phone.” It was unprecedented for the American president not to receive the OAU chairman, but Sassou Nguesso was undaunted and had a montage of doctored photos featuring him with President Reagan published on the front page of the government newspaper in Brazzaville, literally papering over the contretemps for his own people.
Sassou Nguesso knew that Congo’s relations with the United States would continue to be characterized by American apathy, at best. The Soviets were too involved in the politics of the country and supplied much of the military assistance, while the French managed the economic relationship and greased the palms of those who counted. Both were suspicious of us.
The Congolese president needed, however, to mark his time as head of the OAU with some visible success, and that played into our own policy goals. For all the pressing issues facing Africa at that time—everything from the debt shadowing the continent to Namibian independence—there was one that the Congolese might be able to help us with. That was the Angolan war.
For a dozen years, Cuban troops had passed through the Point-Noire port on the Congolese coast on their way to fight on the side of the MPLA1 government against the insurgency of Jonas Savimbi and his South African and U.S.-supported UNITA movement. Many of the MPLA’s senior people had been in exile in Brazzaville during the last days of Portuguese rule in the mid-1970s, and relations between Sassou Nguesso’s political party and the MPLA were very close.
Soon after he returned from his disappointing trip to Washington, Sassou Nguesso sent his adviser, Dr. Seydou Badian, to meet with the ambassador and me to discuss how we might restart the moribund negotiations with Angola. Badian, a Malian national, had been a minister in the first post-independence government of Mali in the 1960s. He was a highly respected author, as well as a politician who in his youth had been an avowed Maoist. As minister, he had been Mali’s point man on Communist China. He had also spent several years in a notorious prison in the Sahara Desert after a military coup when he had been on the losing side. This incarceration had left him no less passionate about the future of his continent, albeit less enamored of the Chinese model of governance. Although he was still a socialist, the years in jail had cured him of his passion for revolutionary regimes. He was in semi-exile in Brazzaville with his adopted daughter, helping Sassou Nguesso manage the OAU portfolio. Though he was an unlikely interlocutor for the U.S. government, his acumen and wisdom outweighed his communist background for me, and, eventually, for Chester Crocker and his team as well.
By this time, close to fifteen months had passed since the last time we had spoken to the Angolans. Positions had hardened and hostilities had increased, and the flood of troops from Cuba and South Africa had given the war a nasty international flavor. South African troops and American military assistance supported the rebel army of Jonas Savimbi, while Soviet arms and Cuban troops came to the aid of the government. It was a hot war during the waning days of the Cold War, with proxies doing the fighting and killing and dying. Battles over control of our Angola policy were paralyzing Chester Crocker and the Africa Bureau at the State Department. The South African government, American lobbyists, and conservatives in both the administration and in Congress were effectively undermining any initiative that was not directly related to unabashed support for Savimbi. The newest darling of the American right, and a
bad actor, Savimbi had a terrible record of human rights violations, and, having received his guerrilla training in China, he could hardly be called a democrat.
From my perspective in Brazzaville, it was simply not acceptable for us to be doing nothing in the face of the worsening situation in Angola. Continuing the war would only serve to leave all sides embittered, and while the Angolan government was admittedly not pro-American, neither was it the rigidly Communist regime that the American right wing liked to set up as a bogeyman. While lobbying for a renewed effort on the part of my government, I knew that in most diplomatic careers, hewing to the administration line is what’s expected of a diplomat. And yet, I also knew that Foreign Service officers in my position often endeavor to influence the future direction of that line. Diplomats must sometimes act like lawyers, frequently defending positions they may not believe in. The similarity doesn’t go far, though, because in diplomacy, you have the opportunity to offer constructive alternatives. In the event the differences with your government are too great, you may resign. But when one shares strategic goals, the fact of tactical differences in approach is not a reason to resign. As it was, I shared a key part of Chet Crocker’s vision for the continent: evolutionary change in southern Africa. Even where I might have differed with the tactics, I saw his approach vindicated years later in the independence of Namibia and the peaceful transition to black rule in South Africa.
But Crocker did not have a particularly high opinion of Sassou Nguesso at that time, given Sassou’s relationship with the Soviets, his socialist bent, and Crocker’s sense that Sassou was not serious about brokering a peace and probably could not produce one even if he tried. So, when those of us at the embassy in Brazzaville were told that Sassou Nguesso wanted to use his good offices and his position as OAU chairman to help bring the Angolan war to an end, and duly informed Washington of these facts, we were met with a steely silence. In the ensuing months, the embassy kept pushing the State Department to give the Sassou Nguesso gambit a chance. We even sent Badian to Washington to meet with Crocker and make the Congolese case directly.
Finally, in April 1987, Crocker and a delegation arrived in Brazzaville to test the waters. Sassou Nguesso had promised that a senior Angolan official, Manuel Alexandre “Kito” Rodrigues, then the minister of interior and number two in the government, would be the Angolan representative. This had been the hook to persuade Crocker to come.
Crocker and his delegation arrived for the meetings only to find the Angolan delegation headed by Vice Foreign Minister Venancio de Moura, a hard-working bureaucrat but no political powerhouse. Kito was still in Luanda because his president, Jose Eduardo Dos Santos, had traveled to India, and according to Angolan protocol, he and Kito could not both be out of the country at the same time. Thus, the meetings were threatened before they even started. Sassou Nguesso pulled every string he could and, by sending his plane down to Luanda, managed to produce Kito the next day. The meeting itself lacked substance, but it marked a turning point in the negotiations. It was the first time Crocker had directly engaged the Angolans since January 1986, and the eventual result was an agreement, signed in December 1988, to withdraw both Cuban and South African troops from Angolan territory. The Angolan civil war wasn’t over, but at least the proxy armies were going home.
It had been a slow but patient negotiation, and it validated the underlying principle of constructive engagement: that the process has to be constant and paced to minimize the negative impact that change always brings. It involved several trips to Brazzaville of Cuban and South African delegations, as well as Americans and Angolans, and bilateral discussions elsewhere. The tangible benefits included the withdrawal of international forces from Angola, and the first de-escalation of one of the proxy wars we were involved in against the Soviets around the world.
I never thought that I would see South Africans like Magnus Malan and Pik Botha set foot in rabidly socialist Congo. But the photo of the delegations to the Angolan talks, which included both Cubans and South Africans, on the front page of the Congolese newspaper said it all. As Crocker himself noted, South African Foreign Minister Botha was caught looking at the others in the photo as if “they were cockroaches walking across his dinner plate.” The feeling was mutual, but necessity made them all bedfellows.
In late 1987, one of Crocker’s chief assistants, Robert Cabelly, traveled to Brazzaville. I had known Robert for several years and liked him very much. He is one of the smartest Africa hands I know, discreet and very effective. We went to lunch, and over coffee in a Brazzaville cafe, he said that Crocker had been impressed with what I had accomplished there and wanted to reward me with “whatever job you want that he controls.” I jumped at the chance to have the position I had always lusted after—the Africa/Middle East-watcher slot at the American Embassy in Paris. The person in this job followed what the French were doing from the Arabian desert to the South African Cape. I had always harbored a not-so-secret desire to live in Paris, and this was the one time I thought I might be able, finally, to land an assignment there. Robert told me that the job was mine and that he would fix it with Crocker when he got back to Washington. Jaunty in the belief that next autumn would find me in the sidewalk cafes of the Champs-Élysées, I saw him off at the airport.
Unfortunately, while he was on his flight home, another good friend of mine who was serving at our mission at the United Nations, Reed Fendrick, learned that his wife, who had worked for me in South Africa, had just taken a job of her own in Paris. Reed got on the phone to Crocker, who, not knowing of my interest, agreed that he could have the job I thought I had just been promised. By the time Cabelly was back in Washington and broached the subject with Crocker, the job was gone.
I was keenly disappointed. As I adjusted to the news that I wouldn’t be going to Paris, it became all the clearer to me that I had arrived at a point in my career when it simply was time to get out of Africa. I’d been on the continent or working on African Affairs for over a decade, with little respite. It was time to do something else, put my foot in some other geographic region. I bid on DCM positions in Algiers, Kathmandu, and in about a half dozen other capitals. I had served five years as deputy at our embassies in two difficult countries and was a known and experienced quantity. I was not interested in returning to Washington at this point, so another deputy position was a natural move.
As I was making my way through the assignments process, I received a cable from yet another career development officer, advising me that “You are in the running for a number of DCM jobs, but nothing is certain at this stage. The Kathmandu DCM position has 142 applicants for example. In Algiers our Ambassador has not yet been named, so there will be no decision on his Deputy for several months at least.”
Because DCM jobs are the key ticket to be punched en route to an ambassadorship, the competition is always fierce, and it is not enough just to have prior experience in the position. Geographical experience and time in Washington in the relevant bureau also factor in. Most importantly, as I have said, it was still, at this time, the one job that an ambassador personally controlled, an appointment not subject to the rules of the personnel assignment system.
My personnel officer also asked: “Would you be interested in going to Baghdad, Iraq?” Apparently, nobody was bidding on Baghdad. It was, after all, on the front lines of an extended and bloody war with Iran, which had been going on now for more than seven years and was still raging without an end in sight. I thought about it for a while and decided what the hell, why not? I knew hardship posts and had lived in places most people would consider dangerous, but I had never been in a real war zone. I thought it might be very exciting, and I knew that the Middle East was a key region to work in. I put my name forward and began waiting impatiently for a response.
Chapter Four
Coming to Baghdad
APRIL GLASPIE, THE NEWLY APPOINTED AMBASSADOR to Iraq, found that her requirements for a deputy and my resume matched up neatly. She wanted someone with manageme
nt skills, an experienced person who would help her rebuild the embassy—at that time still suffering from the results of the break in diplomatic relations between the United States and Iraq dating back to the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. In 1984, agreement had been reached between the two countries to reestablish a diplomatic presence in Baghdad, only to have any steps in that direction halted during the Iran-Iraq war. Glaspie, a career officer, was only the second American ambassador to be named to Iraq since the shuttering of the embassy in 1967. With the decade-long Iran-Iraq war finally winding down, she clearly grasped that the United States would soon be moving to reestablish a presence in Baghdad, with a range of American interests to be pursued in this key Middle Eastern country.
The idea was that I would help her oversee the growth of the embassy, and, in exchange, she would give me an on-the-spot education in Middle Eastern diplomacy. It was a part of the world in which I had no experience, while she, by contrast, was one of our most experienced and knowledgeable Arabists. She had served in most of the Arab capitals and in key jobs at the State Department. Widely acclaimed as one of the best of her generation, April Glaspie understood all the issues and knew all the players very, very well.
It was a great opportunity, and I jumped at it. The Middle East Bureau was always seen in the State Department as an entity unto itself, insular and very difficult to break into, especially at senior levels if you hadn’t come up through the ranks within the Bureau. I didn’t know who else might’ve bid on the DCM job in Baghdad, but there was grumbling in the Bureau that an outsider like me got it. I was not a career Arabist, and I would have to work to overcome my outsider status.
In a coincidence that produced uneasy laughs and some anxiety, the day I received official word that I was being assigned to Baghdad, bold headlines in the International Herald Tribune announced that the missile war had suddenly resumed between Tehran and Baghdad. With scud missiles being lobbed back and forth between the two cities, I couldn’t help but read the letter assigning me to Baghdad with mixed feelings. On the one hand, it was an opportunity to be involved in diplomacy of great strategic importance; it also offered a logical progression from the work I’d done on the Angolan peace process. Nothing could be more satisfying than being part of a team that helps to end wars.
The Politics of Truth_Inside the Lies That Put the White House on Trial and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity Page 8