I Didn't Do It for You

by Michela Wrong

  The fedayeen’s high-profile targets were the Ethiopian army commanders. However many bodyguards they took on, however many times they might change cars or alter their routines, these men could never feel safe. One top general was gunned down with his driver and bodyguards outside an eye hospital by fedayeen who disguised themselves as eye-patched patients.2 Another colonel was shot outside the bar run by his girlfriend, an EPLF member in league with his killers.3 But for the most part, this was a war between the fedayeen and the spies: the Ethiopian undercover agents and Eritrean collaborators trying to infiltrate and destroy the independence movement.

  ‘Most of our targets were Ethiopians. They were air force or navy or policemen who were pretending to be civilians but were actually working as spies. We had a list.’ Many of those who featured on the list had been spotted surreptitiously entering or leaving an Ethiopian detention centre opposite one of Asmara’s two main cinemas. ‘Little boys noted down the registration plates of drivers pulling up. So we knew who the spies were. Or sometimes they’d have been overheard boasting about their exploits in bars.’ No wonder Asmerom prefers deserted meeting places.

  ‘The most important thing was to study everything thoroughly, the place, the person, the bars he liked to frequent, what time he left work. Timing was critical. Lunchtime was good.’ Asmerom will not say how many of these operations he was involved in. Every account is prefaced with a vague, all-embracing ‘We’. ‘We did this,’ ‘We did that’, never ‘I’. There is more at play here than the self-effacing modesty of the Fighter. The relatives of several fedayeen he knows met strange, mysterious deaths in subsequent years. One was stabbed to death while swimming at the coast. Vendettas can stretch across the decades.

  The fedayeen’s tactics were dictated by Asmara’s confines. The city was tiny, it could be crossed by foot in an hour, and about a quarter of the population was Ethiopian and therefore not to be trusted. How to stage ambushes and executions, then vanish into thin air, in one of the most parochial capitals in Africa, where everyone knew each other’s business? Cars were highly visible, because so few Eritreans could afford to own them, and therefore ill-suited for getaways. The fedayeen fine-tuned a tactic that would have seemed comic, had it not proved so grimly effective: the bicycle assassination squad, or ‘bandit’s tanks’.

  Asmerom remembers the last time the technique was used. It was against a young man who had been working as a pusher, trying–the fedayeen believed–to hook clean-living young Eritreans onto drugs. ‘He was a very handsome boy, with lots of money, and he was always hanging around young men and ladies. He was very dangerous.’ Two youths were placed on lookout, casually loitering with their bicycles in their hands as they monitored the prospective victim, sitting in his car. The two designated killers strolled up and shot him dead. Seizing the bicycles held at the ready, the fedayeen bicycled furiously off into the distance. ‘It was always a good idea to use four people for an operation. Two on watch and two to carry it out.’

  In the years Asmerom worked for the fedayeen, 25 assassinations were successfully staged, half of them carried out by bicycle squads. The Ethiopian authorities reacted by first banning bicycles from the main thoroughfares that sliced across the city, a ban which remains in force to this day, and then outlawing bicycles altogether. Asmerom was none too bothered. ‘I preferred operating on foot anyway.’ But the Eritrean population paid a high price for the fedayeen successes. Adopting similar tactics to the Nazis in occupied Europe, the Ethiopians applied a 10 to 1 ratio when punishing local residents for a fedayeen operation. Students and high-school students considered likely rebel sympathizers were garrotted with piano wire, women snatched away and gang-raped in the army camps.

  He lived the underground life for four years. He was nearly caught in 1976, when Asmerom and a woman fedayeen tried to hijack an Ethiopian Airlines plane to fly to Sudan, where they planned to demand a ransom that would go into ELF coffers. The two had smuggled a pair of pistols into secret compartments sown into their bags. Passing through airport formalities, Asmerom watched in horror as an Ethiopian security woman inserted a sharp fingernail into a seam and began pulling the bag apart. ‘I seized my accomplice’s knee and said: “They are going to discover us.”’ She froze, paralysed with fear. ‘She was only a little thing, very quiet and shy. She just threw her hands up in the air. So I left her.’ Pretending to have forgotten a piece of his luggage, Asmerom ran for the exit, jumped into a car parked with its key still dangling from the ignition, and drove to safety. His conspirator paid for her hesitation with a 12-year prison sentence.

  It had been a close shave, and there were others. Once, walking on the city outskirts, two trucks of Ethiopian soldiers pulled up suddenly on either side. ‘I thought, this is it, I have to die.’ But onboard was an Ethiopian spy Asmerom had once shared a beer with. ‘He called out, “Don’t worry, he’s one of ours.” It was a moment from God.’

  But Asmerom was running out of chances. The Ethiopians were looking for him, his sisters had been jailed and his father beaten so badly about the shoulders he needed a skin graft. In any case, by the late 1970s the era of the underground movement was reaching a close. The war had not followed its anticipated course and amongst Eritreans, the bleak realization that the conflict would be long, testing, and possibly unsuccessful was sinking in. The number of those ready to work as informants for the Ethiopians rose, and the list of fedayeen falling into enemy hands lengthened.

  It was time to end it, and Asmerom left for the front, moving on to Kenya and then London. There, he slept quietly in his bed for the first time since his teens. When Darren, his Hope & Anchor drinking partner, asked him if he had ever been a militant, ever seen someone shot, he changed the subject. How could his well-meaning friend, who had never encountered violence outside a football stadium, ever hope to understand? ‘British society was so different. Darren would have looked at me in a different way. I’m not a murderer. We had to win our independence or die.’

  Was he, in fact, a murderer, or the Eritrean equivalent of a French Resistance hero? Talking to Asmerom was like looking down a kaleidoscope. A slight turn of the wrist and the shards of colour shift, the pattern changes, taking on a new configuration. Here I sit, sharing a beer with a middle-aged family man reminiscing with rueful charm about hangovers and pubs. But for a split-second, imagining what it would have been like to be a passenger on a hijacked Ethiopian Airlines flight, with a pistol-waving Asmerom striding down the aisle, single-minded deliverer of justice, I shudder. ‘My God, this man’s dangerous, a terrorist.’ It’s a switch in perspective even Asmerom seems to find problematic. ‘Sometimes, thinking about the past, I frighten myself.’

  But what haunts him is not guilt, but loneliness. He returned to Eritrea after liberation to save the crumbling family enterprise but found himself ill at ease, no longer attuned to doing business in Africa. Abraham is long gone, killed in western Eritrea when the Derg launched a massive offensive in 1978 to oust both rebel movements from the towns they held.

  Asmerom scoffs at Eritrea’s new generation of soldiers, who he suspects do not possess the wiry capacity for suffering, the potential for desperate acts, of the dead young men whose photos litter his office drawers. ‘They go to bars, to discos, they always seem to have money to spend, although no one knows where it comes from. The old guys,’ he says approvingly, ‘were different. The old guys were really violent.’ Like the Kagnew GIs, Asmerom knew what it was to be part of a brotherhood, young men sharing moments of heightened emotion, more besotted with each other than they would ever be with their women. But unlike Zazz and his buddies, Asmerom cannot exchange e-mails with those who shared his underground life or attend backslapping reunions. And you sense he is asking himself the question: was it really worth it? Did his generation make, too lightly, in the careless ways of youth, sacrifices that were greater than they were capable of grasping at the time? Dying for a cause comes ridiculously easy to the young. They offer up their lives with such casual
generosity. It is in old age that the gesture becomes astonishing, and even the lesser steps along the way turn grindingly difficult, punishingly costly. ‘You get so angry when you’re young. You think you have to fight. But later on, you look back and you realize you’ve gone from country to country, you’ve had many experiences, yes, but you’ve never had a career in your life, you have no classmates, no one to go and have a drink with.’

  CHAPTER 13

  The End of the Affair

  ‘What once seemed a she-lion now looks like a dog.’

  Tigrinya proverb

  Haile Selassie’s ousting did not take US policymakers by surprise, although the bloodshed that followed did. Washington had become so sceptical about the imperial government’s future that the embassy in Addis had been instructed to cultivate good relations with any of the Emperor’s likely successors.1 In August 1973, a year before the coup, President Richard Nixon felt uneasy enough to order a prompt review of US military assistance to Ethiopia and recommend the withdrawal of all but ‘designated residual functions’ from Kagnew by the end of fiscal year 1974.2 But the Watergate scandal was looming, and Nixon was soon caught up with events closer to home. Its mind elsewhere, his administration convinced itself Washington would be able to enjoy the same cosy, mutually advantageous relationship with Ethiopia’s new leadership as it had with the old. The Derg’s fondness for denouncing capitalism and railing against the CIA did not go unnoticed, but was dismissed as crowd-pleasing rhetoric. Determined to woo the new power in the land, the US actually chose this moment to hike funding to levels Haile Selassie had only been able to fantasize about, arguing that this was the best way to ensure a pro-Western government emerged. Amazingly, more than one-third of the military aid Ethiopia received from the US over a 25-year period would be given after, not before, the Derg’s takeover.3 ‘Suspension of these shipments would only strengthen the hands of radical elements among the military and further frustrate the moderates, perhaps leading them to concur in more radical initiatives,’ the State Department explained to the incoming president, Gerald Ford, in August 1974.4

  With the Soviet Union firmly implanted in Somalia, this really was not the time to lose a US foothold in the Horn of Africa, argued policymakers, reluctant to turn their back on decades of carefully-fostered relations. US influence had played its part in the creation of a generation of Western-trained technocrats and military officers in Ethiopia and it seemed only logical to assume that these moderates–men the US would be able to do business with–would now come to the fore, Washington reasoned, making a mistake it was to repeat a few years later in Iran. Yes, it was true that the statements coming from the new regime were somewhat radical in tone, but a soft form of African socialism, one that fell well short of classical Marxism-Leninism, would be acceptable. The Derg had promised Ethiopia’s foreign policy would remain unchanged. A little flexibility on ideological issues therefore seemed in order, particularly in view of the battering US global prestige suffered when its forces were sent scrambling out of Saigon. ‘After the withdrawal from Vietnam, the message coming from Washington was that the status of the US would suffer if it stopped supporting Addis,’ recalls Keith Wauchope, deputy principal officer at Asmara’s US consulate between 1975 and 1977. ‘Our credibility, we were told, was at stake.’5

  It was not a view staffers at the consulate shared. Those on the ground were becoming convinced not only that Kagnew was no longer worth the candle, but the entire US–Ethiopia relationship was untenable.

  The words ‘Kagnew Station’ and ‘Top Secret’ had always worked like a charm when it came to winkling no-questions-asked grants out of Congress. But the standard arguments voiced in Washington to justify policy in the Horn were lagging dangerously behind the science. Advances in satellite technology were making Kagnew’s unique geographical and climatic conditions irrelevant with a speed no one had anticipated. In 1960, Eisenhower had approved the first launch of a spy satellite. The details gleaned on Russian radar systems delighted US scientists, and 10 years later Rhyolite, a satellite which orbited in time with the earth, picking up microwave signals, was launched. After that had come a generation of satellites designed to hover over Russia’s most inaccessible regions.

  Now that the Soviet space and missile programmes were being tracked from the darkness of space, Stonehouse was obsolete. Too unwieldy to be shipped elsewhere, its vast dish antennae were sold for a paltry $6,000 to an Asmara merchant who laboriously dismantled them–no mean feat in itself–and sold the metal as scrap. In early 1972, in recognition of the new status quo, the ASA pulled out of Eritrea and control of Kagnew passed to the navy, which used it to relay messages to the US fleet in the Indian Ocean and American bases in the Middle East. Kagnew staff had less and less to do with each passing year. By 1975, only a handful of Kagnew’s 19 sites were still operational. A base that had once housed more than 4,000 men, women and children, linguists and decoders, army officials and contractors, had shrunk to a skeleton crew of 13 naval personnel and 45 civilian contractors. With two-thirds of the buildings deserted, the men roamed the now-oversized base like ghosts.

  But if there were purely practical questions to be raised about Kagnew, whose future was in any case due to come up for formal reconsideration when the 25-year base rights agreement expired in 1978, larger moral and strategic issues could no longer be ignored. The original deal America had struck with Addis–guns for Kagnew–came to seem positively Mephistophelian as the Derg, outnumbered and outmanoeuvred by the rebel movements, struggled to regain the upper hand.

  ‘The Ethiopians kept justifying their need for arms on the basis of the continuing threat from Somalia,’ remembers Wauchope, a diplomat with a keener moral conscience than some of his peers. ‘But in reality we saw them using the weapons against the separatists in Eritrea, something we didn’t think they should be doing. We could see the jets the US had provided taking off from Asmara airport and we could hear the bombs going off and the artillery, mortars and anti-tank weapons we’d sent being fired. We knew they were using those weapons in Eritrea and we reported that back to the embassy.’

  When the EPLF and ELF launched a joint drive on Asmara in early 1975, the Ethiopian army went into action with a ferocity born of desperation. Looting and shooting, Ethiopian soldiers rampaged through the city, opening fire on passing minibuses, dragging residents from their houses and gunning them down in the street. When the bullets ran out, they used bayonets. During a four-day killing spree, hundreds of civilians–some put the death toll as high as 3,000–were slaughtered. Asmara had become an oppressive city of horror, hemmed in by army roadblocks, paralysed by curfew.6

  Wauchope began keeping a tally of the murders carried out by Ethiopian forces, so indiscriminate they even included members of his own staff. ‘In the two years I spent there I counted 450 murders, almost exclusively of Eritrean civilians. One of the victims was the brother of an employee, who was hung, another employee was shot on the road for no reason. The Ethiopians would descend on a neighbourhood and the eviscerated bodies would then be left out on the street to intimidate people,’ he remembers. Once the capital was secured, the army shifted its focus to the countryside, where it burned 110 villages, bayoneting and shooting hundreds of peasants suspected of collaborating with the rebels.

  The unrelenting brutality, the diplomat saw, was transforming Eritrean attitudes to the Americans. In the 1960s, respectable Eritreans might have been shocked by the loutish behaviour of the Kagnew boys, but they nonetheless appreciated the hundreds of jobs created by the base and the schools and leper clinics opened by US personnel. By the mid-1970s, deep bitterness had set in. The Eritrean public was making the connections so many Kagnew men had preferred not to register. When the Ethiopian army blew up the houses of suspected collaborators, they used US rocket-propelled grenades. When they strafed rebel trenches, they did so from American F-5 jets flown by pilots trained in the US. When Ethiopian convoys trundled through towns, they did so in US Mack trucks, and w
henever the rebels captured weapons, the prize included spanking new US-made mortars, machine guns and rifles.

  If Washington was going to support Mengistu with such gusto, Eritreans decided, then the Americans were no longer welcome. ‘People were telling us, “We have been your friends and hosts for many decades. We have allowed you into our homes and country. Now these people are coming after us and they are using your weapons against us, your friends and your hosts,”’ recalls Wauchope.

  Wauchope and his colleagues registered a shift in tactics by the up-till-now forgiving rebel groups. Two Americans working on one of Kagnew’s more remote facilities were kidnapped and taken into the bush. Then the British honorary consul, Basil Burwood-Taylor, was taken hostage and smuggled out of Asmara on the back of a camel.7 This kidnapping, staged in Burwood-Taylor’s office in broad daylight, brought home a fundamental truth. ‘We realized that these people had access wherever they wanted, because the population was supporting them.’ Two more Americans were seized, and the rebels threatened to try their prisoners for deaths caused by US arms deliveries. Under pressure from anguished parents of the kidnapped men, US Congressmen woke up to the realization that their country was heavily embroiled in the Horn of Africa and began peppering the then Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, for explanations.

  Then the atmosphere darkened dramatically, as far as Washington was concerned. ‘Two American contractors hit a landmine that had been deliberately placed on a road leading to a remote Kagnew site. They were blown through the roof of their car and killed. That changed things very substantially,’ says Wauchope. Kagnew decided to draw in its horns, closing down hard-to-police outlying facilities and running both broadcast and reception sites from the same location–something no radio technician would normally recommend. But the Americans could not fence themselves off from reality: a fifth US employee from Kagnew was kidnapped. ‘We had feedback from the Eritreans to the effect that they didn’t intend to torture or kill or put the hostages on display. They simply wanted to send us a message that they were unhappy with our support of the Addis government.’