The Good American

by Robert D. Kaplan

  It was about 4:30 a.m. now. Dewey announced that they would meet for an early breakfast at six. He was relentless, and his military background really showed. Gersony, in jet-lagged agony, only wanted to sleep. An hour later, he struggled to the balcony of his room and saw the Nile flowing by. “I’m at the Nile!” he said to himself. “Why complain!” It was a life-affirming moment. Suddenly he realized that his life had not been a failure after all.

  That same morning Dewey and Gersony made the rounds. They saw Nicholas Morris of UNHCR, who had not been particularly cooperative about helping the Falashas. Dewey had been pressuring Morris from Washington to be more energetic in general about helping Ethiopian refugees overall. Dewey had earlier sicced Fred Cuny on Morris. Cuny was an aggressive, somewhat tactless, and absolutely dynamic disaster relief consultant who sometimes worked for Dewey as a private contractor, and who knew how to get people and organizations cracking with his sharp elbows and confrontational style. It was a testy meeting. Dewey almost lost his temper with Morris. “But Dewey will leave in a few days and then I will have to get along with this guy,” Gersony thought mournfully.

  At the U.S. Embassy they met Ambassador Hume Horan and Deputy Chief of Mission David Shinn. The ambassador was, well, a presence in his own right. Shinn, with a fair complexion and black glasses, impressed Gersony as combining serious academic and historical knowledge, and yet he seemed quieter than John Bennett even, almost hermetic. “They’re both really smart. I can work with these guys,” Gersony thought. Whereas Weaver, because of the sensitivity surrounding Operation Moses, had worked directly for Horan, Gersony would report to Shinn.

  Gersony, by this point in the day, having not slept the night before, was overwhelmed by the scope of his assignment. Sudan was truly an immensity of crises with millions of people at risk around its borderlands, he thought, less a country than a blank space surrounded by countries that were collapsing in their own right.

  Khartoum had so little control over its hinterlands that a Libyan army convoy, bringing guns, grain, and dried-milk powder from the Mediterranean port of Benghazi 1,400 miles away, would reach the western Sudanese town of El Fasher before convoys from Sudan’s own capital city were able to. “No umbilical cord links us with the central government,” the commissioner of Northern Darfur, Abdul Hafiz, told me when I visited the far-flung famine-stricken province in 1985 as a journalist, during the same time Gersony was the embassy’s acting refugee coordinator. Hafiz said his only way of communicating with Khartoum was by radio from El Geneina, near the Chadian border. It was no surprise that the goods on sale under the wattle stalls in El Geneina’s market came by way of Libya and West Africa, rather than via Port Sudan by the Red Sea. There was nothing harder than moving goods from one part of Sudan to another.

  Khartoum, in short, functioned more like a large trading post than a real political capital governing a real country. Yet U.S. assistance to Sudan exceeded $450 million at the time. This included over $200 million for emergency famine relief and $45 million in military aid. On the African continent only Egypt was receiving more American taxpayers’ dollars. Not only altruism was involved. Sudan controls the headwaters of the Nile—the lifeblood of Egypt. Egypt’s survival as a pro-American power in the Middle East was largely dependent on Sudan remaining submissive, and this submissiveness could not be taken for granted. The damage that Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi could do from a foothold in Sudan, slashing at Egypt’s jugular, the Nile, would be far greater than anything he could do by overrunning Chad or Tunisia even.

  More than Egypt would be threatened by a Khartoum regime hostile to the West. Sudan reaches into the heart of sub-Saharan Africa. It had a long border with Marxist Ethiopia (practically a Soviet satellite at the time) and a coastline on the Red Sea. Were Sudan to be lost, it would join Ethiopia and Libya in an arc of Soviet influence stretching from the Strait of Bab el Mandeb at the mouth of the Red Sea to the heart of the Mediterranean. This, in turn, would have brought increased pressure on the pro-American governments in Kenya and Somalia, where the United States had the use of important naval facilities.

  In short, Sudan was yet another example of where strategy and altruism were inextricable.

  The Cold War, once again, provided a useful framework for Gersony’s humanity. Indeed, this combination of national interest and humanitarianism came together most effortlessly in the person of the West Point graduate Gene Dewey, a gun-owning National Prayer Breakfast Republican of the moderate sort. In Dewey’s mind, the dichotomy of fighting the Soviets and doing good for your fellow man was not a dichotomy at all, it was all part of a cohesive worldview: since Soviet Communism represented both a strategic threat and a moral one, it necessitated a policy of realist internationalism. It was a time, unlike now, when you could be a realist without being an isolationist who simply gives up on the world, and when fighting for human rights served a strategic purpose, since human rights played a part in weaning dozens of countries away from the Soviets. That’s why the Cold War will always remain special to me, as someone who reported on it not only in the Third World, but in Eastern Europe, too. Of course, there were also arguments about why the United States was supporting Third World dictatorships, especially in Latin America. But they were muted compared to the philosophical battles between realists and idealists that would rage soon after the Berlin Wall fell, when there was no security threat to concentrate the minds of the Washington and New York elites. During the Cold War, it was easier for someone like Bob Gersony, who harbored a conservative streak of national self-interest, to also be a humanitarian.

  * * *

  —

  When Dewey left Khartoum, Gersony had to leave the Hilton.

  But where was he to stay?

  That choice was easy, even if it raised a few eyebrows among the straitlaced Foreign Service officers at the embassy. Gersony chose the Acropole Hotel, a spotlessly clean, brilliantly managed intelligence-gathering factory all its own, costing $20 per night including breakfast and dinner. Here was where all the NGO workers and almost all the journalists stayed. People would knock on your door at ten at night there, having just returned from some refugee camp in eastern or western Sudan, or from the war zone of southern Sudan, and literally pour their hearts out to you. At the Acropole, you didn’t have to work hard to be informed about what was going on in the country. You simply announced your arrival and what room amid the cavernous hallways you were staying in.

  The hallways frequently opened out into common areas with ceiling fans whooshing, where I fondly recall some of the greatest bull sessions I ever heard in my lifetime.

  The Acropole was a monument to the inventive cunning and shrewdness of the Greek trading community in Africa. You stayed at the Acropole partly to avail yourself of the hotel’s Greek managers, who dealt with Sudanese officialdom better than any Western embassy staff could. My visas were never arranged at the Sudanese embassy in Athens, Greece, where I was living in the 1980s, but by the managers of the Acropole, who had them waiting for me at the Khartoum airport. It may be an irony that while hundreds of millions of dollars of emergency assistance poured into Sudan during the great famines of the decade, what in the end really held the relief effort together were the Acropole managers: a trio of Greek brothers from the island of Kefalonia in the Ionian Sea, whose father had come to Khartoum in the wake of British rule. George, Athanasios, and Gerassimos Pagoulatos and their wives ran a fifty-room hotel, arranged not only visas but visa extensions and internal travel permits, helped clear consignments through customs at Port Sudan, dispatched hand-carried documents throughout Europe, and otherwise ran errands for the relief effort all “with the courtesy and aplomb” of captains “of a luxury liner,” observed the European-American journalist Edward Girardet.3

  Emergency Palace was the sobriquet given to the Acropole, which was also compared to Rick’s American Cafe in the movie Casablanca. The only thing the Acropole lacked was li
quor, a sacrifice necessitated by Islamic law. Nevertheless, the conversations that took place over the curried rice, Nile perch, and freshly squeezed lemon juice prepared by “Mummie,” the matriarch of the Pagoulatos clan, had a delirious, intoxicated quality: the effect of the heat, no doubt.4

  The Acropole was perfect for Gersony, who ate only one meal a day and did not drink alcohol or caffeine. Dinners were always at a set time, where he would always do what he was still only starting to do best—what would eventually define his life, in fact: talk very little and just listen. “I’m a listener,” he says. Just as he had listened one-on-one to the Vietnamese refugees in Thailand, at the Acropole he tried hard to listen to the conversations at the other tables. A pattern set in for him. He would travel vast distances in the wet season, battle floods and rains and cholera outbreaks, and come back to the Acropole, where everyone would give him their own stories of their own adventures. “But I tried not to trade. I don’t trade. I’m a receptacle of information. Remember, I was working for the U.S. government. I had to be careful. And so throughout my career I have usually avoided journalists.”

  “Robert was a bit of an enigma to us in Khartoum,” says Graham Miller, an Australian relief worker who also stayed at the Acropole. Miller is a tall, bearded, and bluff geologist with an outgoing, magnetic charm. As someone who had succeeded in business, he was now applying his management skills to humanitarian work. He would disappear for months inside the drought-affected, ethnic-Tigrean areas of Ethiopia, where he would undertake surveys and establish water wells. Upon returning to Khartoum, he would always have dinner with Gersony to relate his experiences, and Gersony, as usual, would listen and try to say as little as possible. This is why some people who were unsophisticated about the workings of the U.S. government bureaucracy assumed Gersony worked for the CIA. His quietness and awkwardness, his dislike of meetings and events—including bull sessions and diplomatic receptions—often lent an air of mystery to him. Miller, who got to know “Robert,” as he called him, well, correctly understood that Gersony worked for some branch of the State Department.

  It was Graham Miller who introduced Bob Gersony and me to each other in April 1985 at the Acropole, two days before the coup that toppled President Jaafar Nimeiri, which I had told Gersony at our first meeting might be coming. We were in the steamy, sweaty dining area of the Acropole, a hothouse of smells and feverish chatter among journalists and relief workers trading stories. Gersony and I saw each other as if across a great chasm of other bodies, and we began talking. The connection was instantaneous. When I returned to Khartoum that summer, both Miller and Gersony would help me on my first article for The Atlantic—about Sudan. And Gersony would inspire me to go to Uganda that year for my second.5 I detected a depth, soberness, and self-awareness in Gersony that instantly appealed to me. He was strikingly different from all the journalists and relief workers, who were naturally more voluble social sorts. Gersony struck me as a very warm and emotional person, but decidedly not smooth in talk and manner. He seemed intensely cerebral, discreet, secretive almost, but not in a rude way. I liked that.

  While people may have had their doubts or suspicions about Gersony, the etiquette of the Acropole was that everybody supported each other, the professional jealousies and competition notwithstanding. “Once I had a high fever and stayed in my room for a few days,” Gersony recalls, “and Barbara Hendrie,” a relief worker whose sheer friendliness made her the reigning spirit of the Acropole, “constantly brought fruit juice to me.”6

  One night around ten p.m., a medical doctor from Connecticut knocked on Gersony’s door. The doctor had been working with the Tigre People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) inside Ethiopia and had walked out across the border into Sudan. The doctor told him about the drought, the quality of the soil, the nutritional conditions, and so forth that fit into a whole basket of information which Gersony instantly grasped—especially after the doctor casually mentioned that a recent TPLF military offensive, which everyone at the Acropole assumed had been a success, had in fact been a failure. The doctor was a perfect source: he was naïve politically so didn’t comprehend the significance of what he was saying, thus he was objective and disinterested. Gersony wrote a classified cable about it, which the DCM, David Shinn, was delighted with.

  Some days later, around midnight, there was a hard, angry bang on Gersony’s door. It was Abadi Zemo, who represented the TPLF and the Relief Society of Tigre (REST) in Khartoum. Abadi was among the most recognizable figures at the Acropole because he had only one arm. He used the stump of that arm to bang at Gersony’s door. Gersony opened the door and Abadi came in shouting and threatening. How dare Gersony report that the TPLF had lost the offensive against the Ethiopian government! Then Abadi quoted back verbatim a sentence or two of Gersony’s cable. It was a complicated situation. Both the ethnic Amharas who dominated the Ethiopian regime and the TPLF were Marxist, so that the real fight was about blood and territory, not ideology, and the Amhara regime in the capital of Addis Ababa was using food as a weapon against its enemies, the ethnic Tigreans and Eritreans. In any case, Gersony suspected that there was a leaker at the State Department. How else could Abadi have gotten that cable? But Gersony said nothing to the U.S. Embassy at the time. It would have caused an uproar amid fierce denials, hurting his credibility. He would quietly investigate the matter the next time he was in Washington.

  And he did. Going down the line of offices of the refugee programs bureau in the State Department some months later, he met a guy, an amiable, inoffensive networking sort of bureaucrat, who casually told him that he had shared a cable with a TPLF liaison. Gersony burned up inside. He felt betrayed. After all, this was not a cable revealing an atrocity or a scandal that the public had an interest in knowing about. Sharing this cable served no higher purpose. But he stayed silent: nothing could be gained by igniting a controversy over a single, classified cable, the sanctity of which even in the 1980s few would take seriously, given how many leaks there were to journalists. But he resolved never again to put anything in a cable that could endanger him or a source. Instead, he would phone Dewey directly with that kind of sensitive information.

  There was one person at the Acropole with whom Gersony did trade information, though. That was Fred Cuny, whom Dewey (as I’ve said) sometimes employed as a private relief consultant. Gersony and Cuny had crossed paths in Guatemala and Dominica, but it was in Sudan at the Acropole where they really got to know each other. They were both competitors in the same field and opposites in personality, so there was a certain amount of rivalry and tension built into the relationship, which their long late-night bull sessions in Gersony’s room partly alleviated. “We were wary friends,” Gersony says.

  “Bob and Fred were certainly opposites,” observes Bill Garvelink, whom Gersony had traveled with in Bolivia, and who spent a lifetime in relief assistance. “But they had one thing in common. They knew how to talk to real people, the farmers and herders affected by disaster. They were the two gurus of the humanitarian field, in my opinion.”

  Whereas Bob Gersony was at heart an introvert and bookkeeper type, making him throughout his career a fish out of water among NGOs and journalists, Fred Cuny was the ultimate extrovert and, as one person said, “twice the size of Bob.” Tall, imposing, a little overweight, Cuny, with his hand-stitched cowboy boots, was a real Texas character—a pushing, hectoring man of action and a “first-rate engineer,” in Gene Dewey’s words—who consequently fascinated journalists and relief workers. When he disappeared under mysterious circumstances in 1995 during the First Chechen War (perhaps the Russians had a hand in murdering him), the elite media and humanitarian worlds were full of encomiums. Cuny always did have a fascination with war and guerrilla groups, the very groups which Gersony, a self-confessed coward, was afraid of and sought to avoid. Maybe Chechnya, with its altogether brutal warrior bands, the effect of both Stalin and militant Islam, constituted one risk too many for Cuny. In the e
nd, Cuny, according to war correspondent Scott Anderson in a detailed biography, was a real hero who imagined he could always save places, even a place like Chechnya, which it turned out he couldn’t.7

  Just as Gersony was a pessimist, both obsessive and methodical, Cuny, who harbored a “congenital optimism,” was impulsive and improvisational, a risk taker who flew gliders and small planes himself, and this only added to his swagger.8 “Fred brilliantly saved thousands of lives in eastern Sudan by delivering water and advising young U.N. relief workers,” Gersony says. “Fred didn’t go anywhere just to get along with people and be nice to them.” To the contrary, Cuny could be the nightmare of complacent aid bureaucracies, and Dewey used him occasionally to light a fire up the backsides of UNHCR and others.

  Cuny, born in 1944, was a year older than Gersony. He grew up in Texas and started a private relief and reconstruction outfit in Dallas. Getting his start during the Nigerian civil war in Biafra in 1969, thereafter hardly a humanitarian disaster occurred anywhere that did not involve him. A civil engineer, his specialty was developing systems for the construction of refugee and displaced persons camps that held hundreds and thousands of people with latrines, sanitation, and so on.

  Gene Dewey says, “We needed Gersony’s systematic, in-depth analysis and assessment to identify options for the best, needs-based humanitarian response from the U.S. government and the multilateral system. After getting Gersony’s workup, we needed to parachute in Fred Cuny, with his ‘lone-ranger’ style, to oversee the start of operations and run things.”

  That is, Dewey—with his own, action-oriented military manner—wanted to use Gersony and Cuny as a one-two punch. Gersony, by listening and writing silently in his notebook, would figure out the difficult, hard-to-admit truths of a situation. Cuny would then storm in and try to alleviate it all. It was a case of realism followed by idealism, even as both men harbored elements of the other tendency.