To Henry Thayer
Acknowledgments
In 2017 and 2018, during the early phase of my work on this book, I received financial and logistical support from the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) in Washington, for which I thank CEO Richard Fontaine and Director of Operations Ellen McHugh: friends both. At CNAS, close friendship and advice also came from Elbridge Colby, Adam Klein, David Romley, and Matt Seeley.
I conducted many of the interviews at the Cosmos Club in Washington, whose warm and ornate rooms provided a perfect setting to quietly engage with people over their diplomatic and Foreign Service memories.
Former New York Times foreign correspondent James Brooke and former CBS News foreign correspondent Allen Pizzey both helped in specific aspects of my research, owing to their matchless knowledge of the developing world at ground level. Help also came from my colleague Erik Fish at Eurasia Group.
Rebecca Cox, director of the office of public liaison in the Reagan White House, was generous with her time regarding research requests. Jennifer Newby, archivist at the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California; Cody McMillian, archives technician at the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library in College Station, Texas; and Dana Simmons, supervisory archivist at the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, Arkansas, all provided assistance for which I am grateful.
Charles Hill, diplomat-in-residence at Yale and executive assistant to George Shultz during his years as secretary of state, read the manuscript, commented on it, and made a number of corrections. I am deeply thankful for his help.
Henry Thayer at Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents was a calm and subtle magician in the way that he analyzed this book and helped move its publication date forward, ahead of another book that I had already completed. Working with him in flipping the order of publication was my editor at Random House, Molly Turpin, who labored tirelessly to mold an unwieldy manuscript into a finished product. Anna Pitoniak was the acquiring editor before Molly came on the scene, and was a promoter of this book at the beginning. I am also grateful to Kate Medina and Tom Perry at Random House for their enduring support of my work over the years. My literary agents, Gail Hochman and Marianne Merola, continue to be there for me.
Carol Poticny helped enormously with the maps and photographs, as she did for an earlier book of mine, In Europe’s Shadow. Finally, I thank my trusted assistant of many years, Elizabeth M. Lockyer, for ordering my professional life in a way that allows me the time to write and research in solitude. Diane and Marc Rathbun have also helped me with the logistics of life. Then there is my beloved wife of thirty-seven years, Maria Cabral, without whom none of this would have been possible.
Glossary
CIO—Zimbabwe’s Central Intelligence Organization
CODELS—Congressional delegation tours
CPA—Coalition Provisional Authority (Iraq)
DART—Disaster assistance response team
DAS—Deputy assistant secretary of state
DCM—Deputy chief of mission—the number two person at a U.S. embassy
DEA—Drug Enforcement Administration
DIA—Defense Intelligence Agency
DMZ—Demilitarized zone
ECOMOG—Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group
EEZ—Exclusive economic zone
FARC—Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, an insurgency supported by drug trafficking
FEDEMU—Federal Democratic Movement of Uganda, an anti-government insurgency
FEMA—Federal Emergency Management Agency
FMLN—Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, Salvadoran left-wing guerrillas sponsored by the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and facilitated by the Cubans
FRELIMO—Front for the Liberation of Mozambique, an anti-Portuguese guerrilla group, with some support from Cuba and the Soviet Union
FSN—Foreign Service National
FSO—Foreign Service officer
ICRC—International Committee of the Red Cross
INL—International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Bureau of the U.S. Government
IOM—Geneva-based International Organization for Migration
IRA—Irish Republican Army
LRA—Lord’s Resistance Army of northern Uganda
MILGROUP—Military group within the U.S. Embassy in El Salvador, at the heart of U.S. military assistance to the Salvadoran government
NGO—Non-governmental organization, usually within the humanitarian aid category
NIC—National Intelligence Council, for middle-term and long-term thinking within the U.S. intelligence community
NPFL—National Patriotic Front of Liberia, a rebel group
NRA—Uganda’s National Resistance Army
OAS—Organization of American States
OFDA—Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance within the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)
OTI—Office of Transition Initiatives within the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)
Oxfam—Oxford Committee for Famine Relief, founded in Britain in 1942
PLO—Palestine Liberation Organization
RENAMO—Resistência Nacional Moçambicana, an indigenous African anti-communist insurgency supported by apartheid South Africa
REST—Relief Society of Tigre (Ethiopia)
RPF—Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front
RSO—Regional security officer in a U.S. embassy
SCIF—Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility for classified discussions and material
SNM—Somali National Movement, a rebel group
TPLF—Tigre People’s Liberation Front (Ethiopia)
UNAMIR—United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda
UNDP—United Nations Development Program
UNHCR—United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
UNRWA—United Nations Relief and Works Agency
USAID—United States Agency for International Development
WFP—United Nations World Food Programme
Notes
MANY SMALL BEGINNINGS
Chapter 1. Vietnam, 1966–1969
1 W. H. Auden, “Brussels in Winter,” December 1938. In Auden’s Collected Poems (New York: Vintage International, 1991), p. 178.
2 Bernard Fall, Street Without Joy: The French Debacle in Indochina (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1961), p. 209.
3 Ibid., pp. 144, 184, and 188.
Chapter 2. Guatemala, 1970–1977
1 See Stephen Kinzer’s The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (New York: Henry Holt, 2013).
2 Just as the CIA overthrow of Mosaddegh was a formative event in the life of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the overthrow of Árbenz was likewise for Ernesto “Che” Guevara. See Jim Newton’s Eisenhower: The White House Years (New York: Doubleday, 2011), pp. 162–69.
3 Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 4–5.
4 Robert J. McMahon, The Cold War in the Third World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 3. I am paraphrasing Columbia University’s Robert Jervis.
5 John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400–2000 (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008), p. 469.
6 Jeffrey James Byrne’s essay in McMahon’s The Cold War in the Third World, pp. 111–12.
7 Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A World History (New York: Basic Books, 2017), p. 261. McMahon, The Cold War in the Third World, p. 1.
8 Westad, The Cold War, p. 56.
9 Westad, The Global Cold War, p. 4.
10 McMahon, The Cold War in the Third World, p. 3.
11 Westad, The Global Cold War, p. 399.
12 Ralph Lee Woodward, Jr., A Short
History of Guatemala (Antigua, Guatemala: Editorial Laura Lee, 2005).
13 Mark Bosco, introduction to Graham Greene’s The Honorary Consul (New York: Penguin Books, 2008).
14 The Guatemalan Congress would eventually adopt the alphabet developed by Gersony’s organization over that of the Protestant Summer Institute of Linguistics for the official Mayan script, with one change in a single character.
15 Brigittine M. French, Maya Ethnolinguistic Identity: Violence, Cultural Rights, and Modernity in Highland Guatemala (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010), p. 54.
16 André Schwarz-Bart, The Last of the Just (1959; New York: MJF Books, 1960), pp. 4–5.
17 An independent British auditor working for a Dallas-based consulting company wrote: “Both the assumptions on which the program’s hypothesis was founded and the style of management adopted by AID represented an unusual, sensitive and innovative approach to intervention in a post-disaster situation….[It] was assumed that the inputs made by AID would result in maximum satisfaction for the beneficiaries, provided that they themselves made the decisions and managed the deployment of materials as they saw fit….This approach is in sharp contrast to that pursued by most relief and reconstruction agencies which act in response to what they think are important needs….The result was a program with very considerable benefits to the rural poor…almost all of the rural people benefited to some degree….” Alan J. Taylor, USAID Guatemala: Lamina and Housing Materials Distribution Program; Ex-Post Evaluation Report (Dallas, TX: Intertect, June 1977).
Chapter 3. Dominica, El Salvador, and South America, 1979–1983
1 The United States would eventually give Charles’s government millions of dollars in aid, in addition to a supplement from the CIA. Bob Woodward, Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981–1987 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), pp. 278–79.
2 Otto Reich, “The Day the Evil Empire Retreated,” Wall Street Journal, October 25, 2018.
3 Robert Reinhold, “U.S. Agency Disavows Forecast of Quakes,” New York Times, January 30, 1981.
4 Joan Didion, Salvador (1983; New York: Vintage International, 1994), pp. 13–15, 22, 34, 37–38, and 72–73. Mark Danner, “The Truth of El Mozote,” The New Yorker, December 6, 1993.
5 Elisabeth Malkin, “Honor Comes Late to Oscar Romero, a Martyr for the Poor,” New York Times, May 22, 2015.
6 Larry Rohter, “4 Salvadorans Say They Killed U.S. Nuns on Orders of Military,” New York Times, April 3, 1998.
7 Anthony Lewis, “Paying for Murder,” New York Times, April 24, 1990.
8 Robert D. Kaplan, Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground (New York: Random House, 2005), pp. 45–46.
9 Didion, Salvador, pp. 87–88.
10 Deane Roesch Hinton, Economics and Diplomacy: A Life in the Foreign Service of the United States (Washington, DC: Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training; New Academia Publishing/VELLUM Books, 2015), pp. 337 and 343.
11 Ibid., p. 334.
12 As it happened, Álvaro Magaña was chosen as president for two years, and would be succeeded by Napoléon Duarte. Hinton, Economics and Diplomacy, pp. 348–49. Tom Buckley, Violent Neighbors: El Salvador, Central America, and the United States (New York: Crown, 1984), p. 28. Didion, Salvador, p. 31.
13 Edward Schumacher, “Floods and Droughts Sweep Across South America,” New York Times, June 12, 1983.
BIG PLAYS
Chapter 4. Uganda, Luwero Triangle, 1984
1 Over the years, cables have gone from being sent by telex and finally by computer. But they have always been put in code and then decoded on arrival, and they are still referred to as cables.
2 Paul Kenyon, Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa (London: Head of Zeus, 2018), pp. 284–87.
3 Robert D. Kaplan, “Uganda: Starting Over,” The Atlantic, April 1987.
4 Ibid. I have relied mainly on my Atlantic essay for historical background.
5 David Lamb, The Africans (1983; London: Methuen, 1985), p. 78.
6 Ibid., p. 88.
7 Bob Gersony, letter to Ann Siegel, March 18, 1984.
8 In mid-October 2003, the ICRC mission in Baghdad, run by Gassmann, was attacked by a truck bomb, killing two guards.
9 Kaplan, “Uganda: Starting Over.”
10 Ibid.
11 Years later, in 1989, Oliver Furley, head of the politics and history department at Convent Polytechnic School in Nigeria, wrote the story of these events in an article, “Britain from Uganda to Museveni: Blind Eye Diplomacy.” It was included in the volume Conflict Resolution in Uganda, ed. Kumar Rupesinghe (Oslo: Peace Research Institute, 1989; Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1989; London: James Curry Ltd., 1989). Furley writes that following Elliott Abrams’s public denunciation of the Luwero Triangle atrocities, “the British government was ready to switch its view of the matter. Malcolm Rifkind, Minister of State at the Foreign Office, said…‘our view of conditions in Uganda does not differ significantly from that of the Americans.’ This was quite a switch, and he was responding to strong criticism [by] Amnesty International, which had accused the Foreign Office of being ‘craven’ and ‘pussy-footing’ in its response to Abrams’ claims.” Furley quotes a May 5, 1985, London Times article by Richard Dowden, reporting that in the Luwero Triangle, “there is no one left for the army to kill.”
12 Don Gregg and Bill Eckert, “Memorandum for the Vice President: Archbishop of Uganda; Set-up for June 27, 10 a.m. meeting.” Washington, June 19, 1984.
13 Years later, the Swiss authorities would settle on a figure of 300,000 killed.
14 Allen C. Davis, oral history, interviewed by Peter Moffat (Washington, DC: Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, June 26, 1998). An oral history is exactly what the name implies: a recently retired diplomat sits down with a researcher operating a tape recorder and speaks for many hours, recounting the story of his life and of his career in the U.S. Foreign Service.
15 Graham Greene, The Quiet American (1955; New York: Penguin Books, 2004), p. 20.
16 Caryle Murphy, “New Ugandan Crackdown Said to Kill Thousands.” Washington Post, August 5, 1984.
17 “What Uganda’s Flag Is Hiding,” New York Times, August 11, 1984.
18 Clifford May, “Amid the Agony of Uganda: The Puzzle of Obote,” New York Times, September 21, 1984.
19 In particular, the September 1984 issue of South magazine (published in London) carried a long report by correspondent William Pike, “Behind the Guerrilla Lines,” about Pike’s 100-mile journey on foot across the Luwero Triangle, in which he wrote about seeing large mounds of bodies on both sides of the road, and the widespread scattering of bones (pp. 29–30).
20 Helen Epstein, “The Mass Murder We Don’t Talk About,” New York Review of Books, June 7, 2018.
Chapter 5. South China Sea, 1984–1985
1 Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr., oral history, interviewed by Charles Stuart Kennedy (Washington: Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, April 14, 1995).
2 Nick Williams, Jr., “ ‘Boat People’ Now Safer: Thailand Cracks Down on Pirates Raiding Refugees,” Los Angeles Times, March 28, 1987.
Chapter 6. Sudan and Chad, 1985
1 This section is drawn from my 1993 book, The Arabists: The Romance of an American Elite (New York: The Free Press), chapters 10 and 11.
2 This completes the summary of Operation Moses extracted from The Arabists, which has a much more detailed account of how Weaver carried out the Falasha rescue plan.
3 Edward Girardet, “From Khartoum to Capetown/An African Journey: Meet the Pagoulatoses and Their Hotel, the Place to Stay in Khartoum,” Christian Science Monitor, July 8, 1985.
4 Robert D. Kaplan, Surrender or Starve: The Wars Behind the Famine (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988), p. 166.
5 Robert D. Kaplan, “Sudan: A Microcosm of Africa’s Ills,” The A
tlantic, April 1986. Robert D. Kaplan, “Uganda: Starting Over,” The Atlantic, April 1987.
6 Hendrie would later receive an OBE (Order of the British Empire) from Prince Charles for her humanitarian work.
7 Scott Anderson, The Man Who Tried to Save the World: The Dangerous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Fred Cuny (1999; New York: Anchor Books, 2000), pp. 4 and 160.
8 Ibid., p. 236.
Chapter 7. Honduras, 1985–1986
1 Corr had sparred with Gersony in Bolivia a few years earlier over the latter’s fieldwork there. But a third of a century later, Corr graciously downplays his disputes with Gersony in both Bolivia and Central America, saying: “I believe that we in the embassy understood there were bound to be some differences. My memory is there were concerns, but our view was that his work was professional.”
2 Médecins Sans Frontières, “Salvadoran Refugee Camps in Honduras 1988,” MSF Speaks Out, 2004 and 2013.
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