It was in the midst of all these events that Gersony walked into Hinton’s office. “The ambassador had a huge face with little bits of hair on his head. He was urbane and polite, and then would start cursing like a truck driver. Everyone was afraid of him. He had a way of cutting immediately to the bone of any issue.”
Hinton approved Gersony’s jobs program in an instant (though years later it would be corrupted and undermined by Duarte’s people). “But I wanted to stop the food aid,” Gersony goes on. “It wasn’t needed anymore, and the Salvadoran army was siphoning some of it off anyway. I had sold the AID guys on how I saw the situation. But Hinton looked me in the face and just said, ‘Don’t fuck with food aid!’ That’s basically all he said. He knew that food aid was the third rail of development politics back in Washington, and therefore you should never cut it off.” When the ambassador was younger and posted in Chile, he had sent a cable recommending a cut in the PL 480 U.S. government food program, administered there by Catholic Relief Services. He got an immediate, angry reply from Washington telling him no, so he had learned his lesson. “But I was a sanctimonious zealot,” Gersony says, “a horse’s ass. I got carried away with my own beautiful arguments [on account of starting to become a good briefer]. I argued with him and he just ended the conversation, and never wanted to hear from me or the AID people again on this matter. He was right. Guns, bullets, supplies, land reform, all were more important in the larger scheme of things, regarding the destiny of El Salvador, than my little program. Hinton had lost patience with me. But as the years go on, I respect his example more and more.”
Hinton would next be appointed the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, another high-stakes, highly complex, thankless assignment, where, in addition to overseeing the aid mission to Afghan refugees, he would support the introduction of shoulder-fired Stinger missiles to the Afghan mujahideen, turning the tide of the war against the Soviets.
Gersony had in fact developed into a good briefer: honing deliberately flat language that counterintuitively enhanced the drama of a situation, as well as depoliticizing it and achieving objectivity. “I tried to take all the edge and emotion out of my written reports, and replace tendentiousness with boring words.” Partly through Hinton’s example, and the way in which he had failed in briefing him, Gersony gradually learned how to anticipate the questions of policymakers who had to focus on the larger strategic picture beyond development and human rights.
* * *
—
In April 1982, Gersony, having just returned to Washington from El Salvador, delivered a series of briefings on displaced persons there. At the second briefing, in the conference room of the State Department’s Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, Gene Dewey came and listened.
Arthur E. (Gene) Dewey was the deputy assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of Refugee Programs, a post he would hold throughout much of the Reagan administration. Later he would become a United Nations assistant secretary general for refugees; and then, under President George W. Bush, assistant secretary of state for population, refugees, and migration. Dewey was another moderate Republican internationalist like Fred Schieck; an Army officer for twenty-five years with two combat aviation assignments in Vietnam and degrees from both West Point and Princeton. In fact, Dewey was a classic, operationally minded soldier-diplomat in the imperial mode: an avid hunter with a flat, middle-American accent that lent him credibility, a participant in national prayer breakfasts who took Presbyterian Bible study seriously. Honest, avuncular authority and clarity of expression emanated from him.
Concerning Bob Gersony, there was just something about him—and something about his briefing—that Gene Dewey immediately grasped, and so he invited him back to his office for a chat. When Gersony told him that he had served in Vietnam, Dewey liked him even more.
Assistant Secretary of State Arthur E. (“Gene”) Dewey, Gersony’s most important mentor, negotiating with the king of Bhutan the return of Bhutanese refugees in Nepal, Thimphu, Bhutan, 2004.
Dewey explained his logic to me: “I had always been frustrated by the FSO [Foreign Service Officer] reporting system. As a White House Fellow in 1968, I was assigned to AID. It was during the Biafran War, and so I decided to go to Nigeria to see the situation for myself. It fit with my military background, even though the FSOs didn’t like the idea of a White House Fellow poking around on their turf. A report came in from the war zone requesting two hundred trucks. I was suspicious. But the FSOs told me that you don’t argue with a humanitarian request. I investigated on my own and, with the help of a Swiss diplomat, discovered that we didn’t need two hundred trucks. What we needed was maintenance for the trucks already in the field. Nothing I saw in the State Department ever since convinced me that I was wrong about FSO reporting issues. Then Gersony showed up and delivered his briefing on El Salvador.
“I had already heard good things about Gersony’s work in Guatemala in the 1970s and so was curious to meet him,” Dewey continues. “He shocked me with his emotional intensity despite the low-key language he used. He spoke with a pen tied around his neck on a leather strap, his trademark. His briefing technique was laborious, analytical, and grounded in specifics. It was all based on what ordinary people had told him. He clearly had situational awareness—what the Foreign Service has always desperately needed.
“At the time I had a problem getting food aid up the Nile into eastern Sudan. I knew that enormous private barges of beer were having no issue coming north up the river, quite economically. So why couldn’t the World Food Programme do that, rather than trucking vast distances? I asked Gersony if he would be willing to go to eastern Sudan to investigate.”
Gersony said sure, he would go. As a former commodity trader and the son of one, he found the problem interesting. He was also ambitious to expand his reach beyond Latin America—which he feared he would never escape from, especially after a consulting assignment in Nepal fell through.
Gersony was starting to see men like Deane Hinton, Gene Dewey, and Fred Schieck as role models. They were authentic heartland Americans, almost exotic in their way, at least for someone from New York with a Jewish background. Such men were idealists at the end of the day, but the kind without any illusions about how the world actually operated.
But Dewey never called back. “I simply got diverted on other issues at the time,” he tells me nonchalantly thirty-six years later.
So Gersony went back to the Latin America circuit.
* * *
—
Every once in a while, the Humboldt Current, which flows northward a few hundred miles off the western coast of South America, goes up a degree or two, connected as it is to the El Niño phenomenon, and sets off epic floods in some places and droughts in others. John Sanbrailo, the head of USAID in Lima, said, “This is a disaster of major proportions, but no one outside of here knows about it.”13 While waiting for Gene Dewey to call back about going up the Nile, Gersony spent 1983 in Ecuador, Peru, and Colombia dealing with these climate-induced catastrophes.
He first went to Ecuador, which is really two countries. There is the capital of Quito, at 9,350 feet elevation in the Andean mountains, cool though close to the equator, beautiful with clay-tiled roofs and with its indigenous population. Then there is much larger Guayaquil to the southwest: a steamy, unpleasant, all-business port city—a muggy, dirtier Houston—with volatile politics and suffering from a huge urban migration. The lowest part of Guayaquil, bordering the sea, is prone to tides and consequent floods. It was home to several hundred thousand people living in flood-prone slum conditions and called by the evocative name El Guasmo.
The Ecuadorian government decided to help by building all-weather roads in a grid pattern, raised a few feet above ground level, throughout El Guasmo. But this merely trapped the water and created quadrants of floating garbage and human feces. Gersony went to inspect and, working with the local corps of engineers, got U.
S. funding of several hundred thousand dollars to install drainage pipes. At this point people were literally living in feces, and the sight of Americans from USAID working with Ecuadorians to solve both an immediate and a long-term problem in the heart of the nation’s biggest city had its impact. Again, it was the Cold War, and Ecuador, like Peru, was an American client state. By now, Gersony had become USAID’s go-to guy for Latin American disaster relief.
While in Guayaquil, Gersony got a call from USAID to head south just over the border to northern Peru, where there was a flood in the region of Piura. But AID first wanted him to fly all the way down to Lima, where he had been before, so he could travel alongside Peruvian president Fernando Belaúnde to the afflicted area itself. Belaúnde was a long-standing and well-regarded, democratically elected leader, a moderate linchpin of American influence in South America. Outside of Perry Seraphin, the prime minister of a minuscule Caribbean island, Belaúnde would be the first foreign leader or high-ranking official of consequence that Gersony would brief in his budding career.
Rather than be impressed with himself, Gersony says: “My first reaction was, I hate this shit. They told me I would be the Peruvian president’s adviser. But I knew nothing! Since neither of us had been to the flood region, neither of us would have any real information, and so I knew I would have nothing to brief him about during the trip back north from Lima. I’m terrible at small talk. I was now scheduled to get to Lima at midnight and had to be ready to leave the luxury hotel there at five a.m. the next day. Big shots just fuck up your schedule. As you would expect, I learned nothing from him. And I wasn’t dressed right, one minute with a president, the next in the field,” he said, still exasperated decades later.
After a brief tour of the flood area, the presidential airplane dropped Gersony off at an abandoned airstrip near Piura without a person in sight. Rather than surreal, it was in its own way a typical Third World experience. He waited in the rain, and waited some more, exhausted without having gotten much sleep the night before. Finally a car picked him up with a local official inside.
Piura was forty miles from the sea. The Pan-American Highway went through it. But like the other nearby roads, it was washed away. It was raining all the time, in a desert that could not absorb water. There were serious health problems, but no medicine. After he had been there several weeks the rain let up. Gersony sent a cable about the specific medical supplies that had to be flown in—generally basic stuff like aspirin, packed in thick, triple-sealed plastic, as he instructed. He authorized $100,000 to be spent to get a road open from the coast at Paita. He never did get the road open on a regular basis despite spending the money. “I learned from that experience to always listen to engineers on the scene. I was there on my own. I got this bug about opening the road. My isolation helped cause my faulty analysis. I was ashamed, sitting in my cheap hotel eating alone, with bugs and locusts jumping into my soup, and the road still not open.” (As it would later turn out, however, the road project mostly succeeded.)
While he was out in northern Peru, in the spring of 1983, Gersony was visited by an official from USAID’s Office of Disaster Assistance, Timothy Knight, a southerner and graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Knight would be struck dumb by Gersony’s sheer energy, surviving in a land visited by all the plagues of Egypt. This meant little to anyone at the time, but twelve years later the Knight-Gersony connection would have momentous consequences for Bosnia in the wake of the Dayton Accords.
Gersony’s cable about his whole experience in northern Peru made its way all the way up the bureaucratic chain to M. Peter McPherson, the administrator of USAID under President Reagan, and a former Peace Corps volunteer himself.
At this time Congress was in one of its periodic struggles with Syria over events in Lebanon and the Arab-Israeli dispute. Congress had recently deobligated $90 million in USAID money for Syria. Mainly as a result of Gersony’s cable, McPherson got the money transferred to El Niño reconstruction in Latin America. In Lima, Sanbrailo wanted the reconstruction money handled by a Washington “Beltway Bandit” firm, the kind that feeds off government contracts. Gersony argued against it. He had learned about Beltway Bandits in Guatemala. They usually had high overheads while relying on just a few people for help and information on the ground. Gersony convinced Sanbrailo to hire him instead, and he would recruit aid workers by taking out advertisements in The Economist and The Wall Street Journal. They got hundreds of applicants and were thus able to find the dozen highly qualified people that they needed.
Gersony, feeling himself on a treadmill doing small-time stuff, unable to advance, headed next to Popayán, Colombia. This was the summer of 1983 and the whitewashed colonial city in the southwest of the country, established by conquistadors in the mid-sixteenth century, had suffered a devastating earthquake some months earlier, on March 31. The Canadian government had asked him to do an assessment. It wanted to send a thousand prefabricated houses to Popayán, but at much higher cost than the original housing, from a company with connections to the Colombian authorities. Gersony saw that the idea was a “loser.” Here, too, he drew on his Guatemala experience. The prefabs were so expensive and yet not sufficiently sturdy. In addition there were cultural issues to consider, given the architectural dignity of the historic city. So he recommended against the idea.
When Gersony returned from Popayán, Fred Schieck asked him to go to Bolivia. Schieck was concerned about how drought relief there was being handled. In the extreme highlands near the capital of La Paz, with its population clad in sombreros and colorful Indian ponchos, half the llama herd had died. Farmers and herders were suffering most, while the tin miners and others in local industry were not affected. The United States had sent 85,000 tons of food aid. But Schieck was worried. “He had an intuition,” Gersony says.
The man in charge of the relief effort at the U.S. Embassy in La Paz was near retirement age. He was topped off, had not advanced in his career, and to Gersony appeared resentful. But there was an assistant program officer for USAID there, Bill Garvelink, who seemed sharp, sardonic, and politically savvy, and who had experience as a staffer for the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Garvelink had just joined the Foreign Service and this was his first overseas assignment. He would go on to direct major disaster and humanitarian assistance missions around the world, and become ambassador to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. On the Iraqi-Turkish border, in the aftermath of the First Gulf War, Garvelink lost an eye when his retina detached and he could not get help in time. In 1983, Gersony had such a good feeling about young Garvelink that he asked him to go along on the assessment tour of the Bolivian highlands. It would be one of the very few times Gersony traveled with anybody. Garvelink, in turn, credits his career success partly to what he learned by just watching Gersony operate.
The Bolivian Altiplano was high, flat desert, among the more desolate landscapes in the world, especially suitable for growing potatoes. The air was thin. There was mass suffering. El Niño, which had caused heavy rains and floods in Peru and Ecuador, had caused drought in this part of Bolivia. Gersony and Garvelink stayed in roadside pensions. These would rank as one-star hostels at best. There was often no heating, and Gersony and Garvelink had to use outhouses at night. Garvelink had never seen anyone like Gersony.
“Gersony was always leaning forward in the car’s back seat, talking to the driver in his perfect, native Spanish. I’ve seen aid officials and ministers all over the world and they talk to each other and never to real people. Gersony would see a guy in a field with a cow, order the driver to stop, and go out to talk to the farmer. He had a manner, this way about him, of how to build rapport with people. ‘How many animals do you have? Have you lost your crop?’ He would talk for minutes on end with market women in crowded stalls. Most of all,” Garvelink continues, “Gersony knew how to listen. He took his time with people. That was his real secret. He was always writing in notebooks, writing d
own everything, even people’s messages he saw scrawled on the walls. He ended the day in midsentence and began the next morning in midsentence.”
Garvelink and Gersony compiled mortality statistics on people and animals, tracked market prices of commodities, and followed the trail of relief supplies, especially food. Over a period of several weeks of research in the Altiplano they gradually discovered something appalling: that the only persons who could get food aid were those with government identification cards. But the farmers and herders affected by the drought didn’t have them, while the tin miners and other people in the towns—who were not affected by the drought—did.
“Relief was not getting to the people who needed it,” Garvelink states flatly. Gersony knew that the U.S. Embassy in La Paz was at fault. But rather than blame anybody, he recommended that the USAID office in the Bolivian capital create cash employment by building roads so the farmers and other victims could earn the money to buy food. And he thought that the project should involve local priests, who over his years in Latin America Gersony had learned to have a high respect for.
Meanwhile, USAID in Washington was having another debate about how to allocate the funds transferred from Syria to the South American countries hit by El Niño. Gersony recommended that most of the assistance go to Peru, where the damage was on a vaster scale than in Ecuador and Bolivia. This gave the embassy in La Paz another reason to distrust Gersony, who in the minds of the Bolivia-based Foreign Service officers was merely a troublesome contractor: one who had already found fault with their assistance program in the Altiplano.
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