* * *
As 2010 approached, I felt as though I had reached the dead end. If the List Project had been the antigen that triggered a reaction in the refugee bureaucracy, it was depressingly clear that the antibodies had now formed and multiplied, numbing any sensation of urgency. Despite personnel changes at the top of the Obama administration’s executive branch agencies, the timeline for getting a visa was growing increasingly protracted at a time when it needed to be accelerated. Every few months, refugee advocates met with the National Security Council to discuss the refugee crisis and remedies, but the meetings felt more and more like a ritual, each actor’s role defined, nothing ever changing.
I had thrown everything I could think of against the problem, working with journalists and lawyers, testifying and pushing legislation, but I was running out of ideas. The List Project had helped nearly one thousand Iraqis make it to America, but there were thousands on the list still trapped in the system.
What else could be done? The media were uninterested: the story’s been written. Congress was uninterested: Iraq’s finished; it’s all about Afghanistan now. The White House was uninterested: this wasn’t our war anyhow. My law firms, ever steady, continued to prod the refugee bureaucracy, but everything had settled into a quiet stasis. The first, second, and nth laws governing this absence of motion were defined by terror—a state of terror so overpowering that the United States government regarded even its closest Iraqi friends as potential enemies. The bills passed by one branch were shredded by another, but no one really protested because we’d become brilliant at terrifying ourselves out of taking any risks in helping them: What if one of these visa programs, however well intentioned or just, let in someone bad? In one case, an endangered Iraqi Christian who worked as an interpreter had been granted a visa, pending the completion of his security check. Soon thereafter, his visa was revoked on the grounds that there was suspicion that he worked for Al-Qaeda in Iraq. When he and others appealed on grounds of common sense—that the terrorist organization wasn’t in the business of recruiting Christians—an official said, “Yes, but wouldn’t that be precisely the way they’d get someone in?”
We were in a spell of our own post-9/11 creation. When our government wanted to do something wrong, we accepted the exigencies of war and turned our backs on the moral choices of torture, extraordinary rendition, “black site” prisons, suspension of habeas corpus, unwarranted wiretapping, and unending drone warfare. We wanted there to be no constraints to do harm to other people if it might keep us safe. So the government swiftly cultivated a sophisticated ganglia of secret prisons throughout the world, contractors to assist in interrogations, a fleet of off-the-books airplanes to shuttle detainees to and from hostile countries.
But when we ask our government to do something right or just, we accept every possible constraint it summons as an excuse for inaction. We accept that it takes the same government years to put an Iraqi interpreter—whose retinal scans, fingerprints, and polygraph results are all within our records—on an airplane and fly him to safety.
“Your country put a man on the moon,” an exasperated Iraqi told me in Baghdad, an expired interpreter badge in hand, his daughter on his lap. “Why is it so difficult for America to give me a visa?”
What could I tell him? That it is the government that owns the language of security and that it doesn’t want anyone to meddle with it when it says it’s keeping us safe? That it owns the language of the counterfactual, which it uses to tell us what awful things might have happened if it had done things any differently? That it owns the language of prediction, which it employs to tell us what terrors might come if we poke or prod it to do too much? That I’d been shouting at it for years about our moral obligation to Iraqis like him, and all they ever murmured in reply was Tick, tick, tick, boom?
I was sick of the narrowness of thought in post-9/11 Washington. Even the best humanitarians among us who put on nice suits and walked into federal buildings seemed unable to change the government’s behavior.
There was really only one strategy left, and it was a real Hail Mary: if I could somehow reframe the debate by appealing to the lessons of history, arming leaders with the precedents established before everything changed on 9/11, the government might finally snap out of it and start acting with an urgency that the imminence of the withdrawal required.
After all, my list was not the first.
21.
Past Is Prologue
EXCERPT FROM:
Minutes of Washington Special Actions Group Meeting
Washington, April 2, 1975, 10:43–11:28 a.m.
Subject
Indochina
Summary of Conclusions
Secretary [Henry] Kissinger: We have spent millions of dollars over the past ten years so that the North Vietnamese could tear up South Vietnam. I think we owe—it’s our duty—to get the people who believed in us out. Do we have a list of those South Vietnamese that we want to get out?
Mr. Philip Habib [US assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern and Pacific Affairs]: There is one, but it’s limited.
Secretary Kissinger: Tell Graham Martin [US ambassador to South Vietnam] to give us a list of those South Vietnamese we need to get out of the country. Tell Graham that we must have the list by tomorrow.
Mr. Habib: The problem is that you have different categories of people. You have relatives of Americans, tens of thousands of people (Vietnamese) who worked for us. . . . One thing I would recommend is that the embassy destroy all personnel records when they leave.
Secretary Kissinger: The Communists will know who they are anyway. Let’s get a look at the different categories of people who need to get out. There may be upwards of ten thousand people.
Mr. Habib: There are ninety-three thousand already on the list.
Secretary Kissinger: Well, get that list. We’ll try for as many as we can.
Mr. William Stearman [member of the National Security Council]: It could reach a million people.
Secretary Kissinger: Well, that is one thing this Congress can’t refuse—humanitarian aid to get people out.
Mr. Habib: It depends on the nature of the collapse.
Mr. Stearman: One possible solution to the evacuation problem is to move some of the people to those two islands offshore.
Secretary Kissinger: Yes, that’s a possibility. Let’s get that list of people who have to get out and some ideas on where we should move them. We may have to ask Congress for military force to help rescue these people. I can’t see how they could refuse.
Secretary [of Defense James R.] Schlesinger: Yes, after a forty-five-day debate . . .
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
—T. S. Eliot
A Tamarind Tree in Saigon
It had been three years since the Bush appointee had yelled at me for “dragging the nation back to the rooftop of Saigon.” Back then, when the list was only a few dozen names long, it had seemed comically overwrought. But as 2010 began, when there were thousands of names and no measurable progress during President Obama’s first year, I was desperate to revive the lessons of the final months of the Vietnam War.
I waded through hundreds of pages of declassified “memcons”—memoranda of White House conversations—from the final weeks of the war, kicking myself for not having studied them earlier and alarmed by what they portended.
In early April 1975, as intelligence reports flooded in that signaled the imminent invasion of the North Vietnamese into South Vietnam, President Gerald Ford convened daily meetings with advisors with the hope of forestalling disaster. A last-second request for $722 million of aid to prop up President Nguyen Van Thieu and the South Vietnamese government was rejected by Congress, all but guaranteeing its collapse.
Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger instructed our ambassador i
n Saigon, Graham Martin, to supply him with the names of the South Vietnamese employees who would need to be evacuated. In discussions with the president, Kissinger estimated that there was an “irreducible list” of 174,000 South Vietnamese employees of the State Department, USAID, and the CIA, but he needed the embassy to produce an official list. In Saigon, the slow-moving Ambassador Martin appeared more concerned with the optics of openly conducting contingency planning than with the fate of our Vietnamese employees: creating a list would send a signal of distress. In the circular thinking of our ambassador, any planning would precipitate the very need for a plan.
Two young foreign service officers serving in Vietnam, Lionel Rosenblatt and Craig Johnstone, were furious about the lack of urgency in the embassy, so they struck out on their own and implemented an ad hoc operation to spirit Vietnamese employees out on departing military flights. When embassy officials discovered their efforts, they issued arrest warrants for both Rosenblatt and Johnstone, who had donned false identities as French businessmen. In the weeks before Saigon fell, the military ran an evacuation out of the nearby Tan Son Nhut air base, loading American civilians and thousands of South Vietnamese onto C-130s and C-141s, but there simply wasn’t enough time or planning to get all of our Vietnamese employees out.
Ambassador Martin described those pushing him to prepare for an evacuation throughout April as “mattress mice,” and in the final days, he denied a request to prepare an evacuation landing zone in the yard of the embassy compound; this would have required hacking down the massive tamarind tree that provided shade for his car, a step the ambassador refused because he thought it would create a sense of panic.
The contingency plan for the last Americans in Saigon was to listen for a code-phrase on Armed Forces Radio that signaled that final evacuation was under way at the embassy: “The temperature in Saigon is one hundred twelve degrees and rising,” followed by Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas.”
When the code was delivered on April 29, the tamarind was hacked down as incinerators burned millions of dollars and classified documents. (They failed to destroy staffing lists of Vietnamese employees, though, which were soon snatched up by North Vietnamese forces.) Thousands of South Vietnamese realized that there wouldn’t be room for them on the small number of helicopters approaching the embassy.
Such was the contingency plan that emerged in the final moments of a long war: a lucky few managed to force their way past the marine security guards or over the fifteen-foot barbed-wire walls and into one of the helicopters. An army captain named Stuart Herrington shouted, “We’re not going to leave you! Don’t worry about it!” through a megaphone at some four hundred panicked local employees, and then made his way to a helicopter on the embassy roof after telling them that he was going to use the bathroom.
After these early mishaps, though, the Ford administration took command of the situation. During a White House discussion about where Vietnamese refugees might be resettled, a congressman suggested the island of Borneo, prompting Ford to interject, “Let me comment where they would go: our tradition is to welcome the oppressed. I don’t think these people should be treated any differently from any other people—the Hungarians, Cubans, Jews from the Soviet Union.”
The American public was not enamored with the idea of resettling a great number of refugees from a war that had torn the country apart, however, and the US Immigration and Naturalization Service pushed back with legal rationale against any large-scale evacuation. So the president addressed the country, declaring that America bore a responsibility to these refugees, and that “to do less would have added moral shame to humiliation.” Congress passed the Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistance Act a couple weeks later in May 1975, allocating an astonishing $600 million, and within a few months, more than 130,000 Vietnamese were airlifted by the military to our base in Guam, where they were processed before flying to the United States.
Within several years, nearly one million Vietnamese had been granted visas.
* * *
I was embarrassed. This wasn’t ancient history, after all. In my trial-and-error approach to prodding the government into acting more swiftly, I had not thought to harness the wisdom of those who had worked on the 1975 evacuation. I asked Frank Wisner, a retired ambassador who had helped implement the massive airlift, to join the board of the List Project to counsel me on strategy. He soon introduced me to others who’d been involved in the efforts, including Judge Mark Wolf in Boston, who had represented the Office of the US Attorney General during the airlift.
Two lessons had emerged from my conversations about the fall of Saigon: one, wishful thinking and excessive concern about optics led many of our employees to be left behind, and two, once the president of the United States stepped in, the myriad excuses put forward by the various bureaucracies fell away and lives were saved.
Abandonment was coded into every war’s end. No matter the continent, skin color, decade, or century, I found local collaborators facing post-withdrawal reprisals by their countrymen. The Hmong in Laos, trained by the CIA to fight against the Pathet Lao, were left behind when the Communists overran the country in 1975. The Harkis in Algeria, loyalists to the French colonial pieds-noir, who held the colony for 131 years, were strung up in the streets after a hasty withdrawal by their protectors in 1962; estimates approached one hundred thousand killed. A common tactic of vengeance upon these “traitors” was to force-feed them the medals bestowed upon them by the French.
For all of the facile comparisons made by journalists to Schindler and his list in articles about the List Project, I was utterly ignorant about our visa policies during World War II. I found my entry point in a Foreign Affairs article about bureaucrats who had defied orders during the Jewish refugee crisis. Its author, the legendary diplomat Richard Holbrooke, put forward a thought experiment:
Imagine that you are a consular officer in the middle of a diplomatic career that you hope will lead to an ambassadorship. There are two rubber stamps on your desk. Using the one that says “Approved” would allow the desperate person sitting in front of you to travel to your country legally. Using the other stamp, which says “Rejected,” could mean consigning that person to prison or death.
It sounds like a simple choice, but there is a catch—a very big one. The person in front of you is Jewish, and your boss has told you to devise ways not to use the “Approved” stamp. Your government does not want these people—these people waiting outside your office, milling around in the street, hiding in their houses—in your country. Approve too many visas and your career will be in danger. Follow your instructions and people will probably die.
Intrigued, I bundled up and trudged to the bookstore down the street in search of a book referenced in Holbrooke’s article, but soon stumbled upon Refugees and Rescue, a newly published collection of diaries and memoranda from the 1930s by a man I’d never heard of named James McDonald. I scurried back to my apartment and began to read.
McDonald, who chaired Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Advisory Committee on Refugees from 1928 until the end of World War II, dictated a diary entry to his secretary at the end of each day. Though the diaries were never intended for publication, McDonald’s daughter brought them to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which released the first of three volumes in 2007.
As I thumbed through the diaries, my heart sank. Though hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees fled Eastern Europe in the late 1930s, the United States was wary of admitting them, turning ships filled with Jews away from our ports, often under the rationale that they posed a security risk to the homeland. President Roosevelt warned, “Now, of course, the refugee has got to be checked because, unfortunately, among the refugees there are some spies, as has been found in other countries. And not all of them are voluntary spies—it is rather a horrible story, but in some of the other countries that refugees out of Germany have gone to, especially Jewish refugees, they have found a number of definitely proven spies.”
&n
bsp; The president’s warnings produced immediate and stalling effects in the State Department. McDonald’s diary included a June 1940 memo to consular officers from Breckinridge Long, the assistant secretary of state overseeing the Refugees Bureau: “We can delay and effectively stop for a temporary period of indefinite length the number of immigrants into the United States. We could do this by simply advising our consuls to put every obstacle in the way and to require additional evidence and to resort to various administrative devices which would postpone and postpone and postpone the granting of the visas.”
Long’s cable effectively halted all immigration through bureaucratic tricks. I could have been reading from my own in-box when I found an exasperated letter from Rabbi Stephen Wise to McDonald a few months later, in September 1940: “With regard to political refugees, we are in the midst of the most difficult situation, an almost unmanageable quandary. On the one hand, the State Department makes all sorts of promises and takes our lists and then we hear that the Consuls do nothing. A few people slip through, but we are afraid, - this is strictest confidence, - that the Consuls have private instructions from the Department to do nothing, which would be infamous beyond words.”
Not only were the tactics and language similar, the success rate was nearly identical. Shortly after receiving Rabbi Wise’s letter, McDonald noted that 567 names had been given to the Department of State, but that after considerable time, only 15 visas had been issued. When McDonald passed along further documentation of visa delays to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, she wrote a note to FDR: “They handed 2,000 names to the State Department and the consuls abroad have not certified more than 50 to come to this country. . . . I am thinking about these poor people who may die at any time and who are asking only to come here on transit visas.”
To Be a Friend Is Fatal Page 27