Krebs went to the Foreign Service from the Southwest. He learned a lot, and he had thrown himself into the cauldron, handling Cold War issues in some of the best bureaus in the State Department. He took initial assignments in Europe.

He had sacrificed his health in the process, and lost a marriage, too, and found himself a long distance from his three-year-old son. Along the way, he had learned his limitations. He was not good at handling stress. For some time, even as early as his first tour, he had begun to feel that he was in the wrong field. His talents were not those of a successful diplomat. He had good intuition, coming from a good knowledge of history, and was a good contact person, but lacked communications and foreign language skills.

His mind, he began to understand, was fuzzy, and his temperament artistic, centered on nuances and aesthetics. He would attend meetings with senior officers, focusing on their manner and how they dressed, rather than the substance of what they were explaining. He was not a good staffer, and hated crisis situations.

Gradually, Krebs began to change. First, he lost some of his ambition, seeing the cost success took on one’s private life. The setback to his health, his more realistic self-appraisal, and the cost to his marriage, had contributed to a new attitude. He began to choose easier, less glamorous, assignments. The loss of excessive ambition was a good thing.

The second change was that he learned to restrain the emotional side of his nature. His mother’s stroke, coming on top of his divorce, seemed to throw everything into overload. Working on Ethiopian famine that claimed two million lives, also had a great effect on him. Merely retelling the stories of children walking to feeding camps led him to tears. The only way he could cope with his mother’s illness, divorce, and the job was to push his feelings into the background. It was a case of denial. Except for his son, he pushed things out of his mind.

The problem was that he over-reacted, and turned off his emotions almost altogether. He lost empathy and avoided relationships. He let friendships lapse. It bothered him, not being able to feel. But, it was better than the anxiety before.

On the positive side, he had regained self-confidence working on Ethiopia, where he had distinguished himself. This was followed by a study tour at Berkeley, a reward. He became more self-contained and less ambitious, with a better sense of himself and what he believed.

In the early days of his subsequent tour in central Africa, he had gotten along well at first with the Ambassador, who had mentored him. But, Krebs’ new self-awareness began to change him. In the past, he had gone along with policies that bothered him, but here he rebelled, opposing U.S. support for a dictator who was our ally. During a discussion of the annual human rights report, Krebs argued we should not in good faith certify, as Congress required, that improved freedom exists in the country. As the Embassy’s Political-Military Officer, Krebs objected to U.S. military cooperation with the local government.

The Ambassador called Krebs in for a private meeting, asking “for his full support,” saying we can not always choose which governments to back, that we gain more by engaging this particular dictator, and, moreover, that we have strategic interests in the country which the local government protects, and these are not a trifle. Krebs countered, by saying “our long term interests in staying in country are actually undermined by supporting the local government.”  By starting to kill rather than imprison his opponents, the dictator has “crossed the Rubicon,” and would bring himself down. We will have been seen as collaborators.  What we need to do, Krebs argued, was show the people that there was hope for the democratic opposition, and that someone was on the people’s side.

The Ambassador agreed with Krebs on the dictator, whom we had to move to a better direction. We would continue to fight him on democracy and human rights matters. But Krebs was underestimating the need for stability.  Closing the argument, the Ambassador referred to “high-level support at all levels” for our policy, which the Embassy was only implementing. “The issue had already been decided in Washington.”

Out of personal loyalty, the Ambassador did not send Krebs home for inability to support his policy, which he could have. But, Krebs was cut out of the loop for the rest of his tour. He no longer saw intelligence reports or held the political-military portfolio. Krebs, for his part, continued to respect the Ambassador. It was simply a matter of balancing idealism and realism in American foreign policy. He and the Ambassador had different ways of attaining that balance.

Krebs received a lukewarm annual evaluation, ensuring no promotion, perhaps for five years. Those were the costs of dissent at a time when you could be thrown out for lack of promotions. But, for Krebs, this was an important step in his life. He had stood up for something.  He had grown in the process and discovered himself. He would live his life, not making big issues, but would calmly go about his life in a rational way, but would not be afraid of taking consequential decisions. He would not be afraid in general.

He found it suddenly easier to make decisions. Things became clearer; he had a more rational outlook.  He would no longer agonize over his son, but would spend vacations with him, and give him financial security and expand their time together over time. He would not worry about his own health problems. He would develop his side interests and moderate his career. Life was not about vertical development up the success ladder, but about horizontal development as a person with hobbies and family. The British understood that.  He would no longer just drift and allow decisions to be made for him. He would live for acquiring knowledge and writing and perhaps teaching someday.

Suddenly, his emotions came back as well, perhaps as a result of his fighting for the human rights. He had been rejuvenated. He had put aside ambition and fought the system, and had still survived with his honor intact. There would be good tours and advancement before him.

During his home leave, Krebs stopped over in Brussels, where he spent time at the Royal Museum. Looking at the Sumerian cuneiform scrolls, he launched into a new hobby, the study of ancient civilizations and humanities.  He would use future vacations to tour the museums of Europe. He was consumed by a desire for knowledge.

From this point on, Krebs’ career was divided between his work and his private interests, as the latter began to occupy more of his thinking.  He enjoyed the Foreign Service for the travel and the contact with foreign cultures.  But, international relations, which had occupied him since his worked in Germany as a college sophomore, and even before, as a boy in Mexico, was now taking second place to his original loves in college, the humanities, history, and American literature.

He found himself going through the motions in his assignments, making the most of them, learning about Africa and Russia, and advancing U.S. interests, but he was increasingly interested in time off and reading.  He would live for retirement, where he would reorient himself to the humanities. He would write or teach, starting a new chapter, and stay close to his son. That would come soon. He saw himself like Dick Diver, in Tender is the Night. How did Fitzgerald put it?  He was “like Grant at Galena, biding his time.”

I was stationed in the Moscow Embassy, but had come to Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, to do some sightseeing over Thanksgiving, arriving aboard the maroon-colored overnight “Red Arrow” train, checking in at the Astoria Hotel, a former Czarist palace which had served as German army headquarters during the World War II siege of Leningrad. The Astoria was fully restored, but not one of the more expensive hotels near the Kirov Ballet used by foreign visitors.

From the hotel, I set out on foot for St. Isaac’s cathedral, passing along the way a four story apartment building with a metal historical marker attached to the outside wall denoting the site of Tchaikovsky’s final residence, in 1897, where he composed his “Pathetique” Symphony. I finally came to St. Isaacs cathedral, with its large golden dome, copper statues, and beautiful gray marble columns which Tolstoy described in War and Peace.

After lunch back at the hotel, I walked over to Nevsky Prospect, the main city boulevard, where I caught a taxi to Peter and Paul Fortress with its twin red brick spires, touring the cells where Dostoyevsky had been imprisoned and Lenin’s older brother executed. There were names carved into the walls by political prisoners from Stalin’s purges in the 1930s. Back outside, it was bitter cold, well below zero, and the afternoon sun was low on the distant horizon. There were only few people on the streets, and those were bundled up in long wool overcoats and fur hats. I could see thin trails of steam in the clear blue sky, drifting horizontally from buildings across the bay.

Keeping my head down to avoid the wind, I forced myself to make it one block to the museum ship “Aurora,” docked on the Neva River across from the Hermitage Museum, formerly the Winter Palace. The Aurora’s guns had fired the opening shots of the Bolshevik Revolution. It was warm inside the ship museum, or at least seemed warm out of the wind. There were two Russian couples besides me aboard, as I drifted around the decks examining photographs of the Revolution and street crowds gathering in 1917.

After an hour or so, as I was leaving the ship, a group of about ten young men appeared on board, milling around and then deciding to depart when I departed, each one shoving a bit as he passed me on the narrow walkway leading from the ship to the street below. They weren’t trying to push me into the icy water below, just providing some welcome to Leningrad. I assumed they were KGB or Naval recruits. Such harassment was not accidental in 1979.

As American diplomats, we knew we were not as well protected when traveling outside Moscow. Leningrad, in particular, was known as a city with an overzealous local KGB, a fact I had discovered during an earlier visit, when I arrived at the US consulate for consultations. One of the Russian security guards in front had stepped out of his guard shack and snapped a photo of me as I passed through the gates. In Moscow, they would not have been so brazen. There was still the semblance of detente.

It was “the bad old days,” before the fall of communism and the Soviet Union. I was on only my second tour, in Moscow, during a low point of the Cold War, with the Soviet military incursion into Afghanistan and US boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics. It looked like Russia might intervene militarily in Poland to crush the “Solidarity” movement. Reagan came in and later called Russia “the evil empire.” Things would get even worse, culminating in the shoot down of the Korean KAL 007 airliner.

We had very little contact in Moscow with Russians, other than conversations with a taxi driver or sales clerk, and we lived in diplomatic buildings isolated from the population, taking shuttle vans together to and from work. We did get to know the Russians staff working at the Embassy, but had to assume they were reporting to the KGB. We also had some social interaction with Russian intellectuals, artists, and dissidents who were friendly with foreigners, either being allowed to be so, or taking chances.

Our official contacts lived in a different world than we knew. Words like democracy and freedom had different meanings. The average Russian on the street seemingly believed what he read in the newspaper about American imperialism, class separation, and Pentagon aggression. He had little desire to travel outside Russia and touted communism. Russia, itself, in those days was poor, with few items in stores beyond a few staples, and everyone wore cheap clothing and lived in three room apartments. There were no smiles on the streets, and no foreign magazines or books.

We were followed, but could rarely spot our followers. Nor was it uncommon to have a Russian citizen approach you on the street, seeing you were an American, and ask you to take a message to the Ambassador. Occasionally, they would push a package in our hands, saying it was “samizdat,” or unauthorized writings, which they wanted you to take out of Russia. We knew the approach could be a KGB provocation, with the handover being photographed. I was approached one time near the Taganka Theater. We were not hard to spot. Our world was a narrow one: the theaters, the Bolshoi, the museums, our Embassy dacha at Zaviedovo, the diplomatic grocery store or “gastronom,” Red Square, a Georgian restaurant, and perhaps a Volga cruise.

Things could get rough. We had human rights officers and military attaches provoked or attacked by so called “hooligans.” A group of our Marine security guards, including my cousin, were jumped one night on Red Square by a dozen men, presumably KGB, as they were leaving to walk back to the Embassy. They made it back, with only one injured, after fighting their way to the Embassy, a couple of miles.

Work in the Embassy Political Section was demanding, with long hours and time pressure. Each morning, I would arrive at my desk at 8 a.m., scan the Russian newspapers, translating as I read, reading between the lines, then writing a five page cable to Washington. My portfolio was Russian relations with the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa, and I was expected to do at least one cable per day. I covered visits to Moscow by PLO leader Arafat, Syrian President Assad, and Jordanian President Hussein, plus a visit by an African National Congress (ANC) delegation asking for support against South Africa, and by Raul Castro, the number two after Fidel, who spent a lot of time in Moscow.

To supplement my reading of Pravda and Izvestiya, I would do some contact work as well, visiting the Latin America Institute, and meeting with experts like Sergo Mikoyan, son of the Foreign Minister under Khrushchev. I might request a luncheon appointment with a Russian journalist, attend a public lecture downtown, take trips to the Baltic States and Russian provinces, and meet Russian analysts at the various African and Middle Eastern think tanks. The meetings we had at the Foreign Ministry were frustrating since relations were tense and formal.

I remember one cable vividly, reporting on the visit by the Algerian President to Moscow. I sent out my usual cable on the event, analyzing the arrival speeches and the joint communique at the end of the visit, proud of some nuances I had unearthed on Russia’s changing policies on the Middle East. That night the phones started ringing with calls from the State Department in Washington, saying the international media had picked up on a Russian political toast during the Algerian visit blasting the US and calling President Reagan a “cowboy.” The seventh floor Chief of Staff called on behalf of the Secretary to chew out the Embassy. How had we not spotted this? I had indeed missed the forest for the trees, reporting the long-winded Russian speeches but missing the reference to Reagan in a dinner toast, and causing the Administration to be blindsided on a major development.

The Ambassador, on instructions from Washington, summoned the entire Political Section into the conference room where he and his Deputy sat stone faced. He said any Foreign Service Officer who didn’t catch a derogatory comment on the President of the United States should consider whether he is suited for this career. I think the word “resignation” was floated. I felt bad because Washington and the Ambassador were right, and because I had caused the entire section to be criticized, whereas I bore sole responsibility. There was silence around the table. I started to apologize, but my boss, Ed Djerejian, the Political Counselor, and my mentor on Russian-Middle East relations, stopped me.

Ed stood up for me, saying he was the head of the Political Section and responsible for anything which came out of it. He, therefore, bore full responsibility, and if the Ambassador and DCM have any beef, they should take it up with him in private. That ended the meeting. That’s the kind of guy Ed Djerejian was.

A week later, things were fine again with the Ambassador, whom I highly respected, and who was helping me report on Russian-Cuban relations. Nonetheless, when I flew out of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport in 1981 at the end of my tour, I told myself I would not return. I didn’t want to spend my life in the Soviet Union. And, I didn’t return for ten years, until communism fell and I was called back. When you are called, you don’t say no.

Flying in a Boeing 747 between Khartoum and Nairobi, over Ethiopia in the night sky, we had reached for altitude, the pilot coming on the speaker to tell us we were going up to 40,000 to fly over an African thunderstorm, and even at that, we felt the occasional bumps and rocks of thunderheads reaching up to us. I could look out my window and see the slight curvature of the earth on the horizon, the first time in a passenger plane then or since. Below was an inferno, a St. Elmo’s fire of connected streaks of lightning spreading out horizontally in all directions, creating a white grid against the blackness, accompanied by random pinpoint flashes of light, further down below, white dots popping off at different places almost simultaneously. I was thankful we could fly over it.

As the Ethiopia Desk Officer in the State Department, I knew Congressman Mickey Leland of New York was down there somewhere, making one of his food runs in Ethiopia, bringing with him a convoy of relief trucks, food donations from the school children of New York City, raised by saving their milk money to help the starving Ethiopians. Children helping children. I had seen the newsreels of Leland on his previous trip to Ethiopia, in his open car leading the convoy, grasping the hands of admiring Ethiopian children who lined the roads as he approached the feeding camps upcountry, with masses of kids running beside and behind the car, cheering and reaching out to touch hands, shouting “Mic-key Mic-key.” Leland was leaning out, reaching back. It was more than touching.

The U.S., like the rest of the world, had been surprised by the famine. We estimated a million Ethiopians had died already, and another two million were at risk. Fortunately, we and the world had mobilized quickly. With the help of the BBC, the support of the UN, and huge funds raised by rock bands, everyone was working together to bring the famine to the world’s attention, creating an outpouring of support. In Washington, at my desk, I received hundreds of calls from average Americans offering cash and food. I still remember one call, from a man in Utah with a southern drawl, speaking amid static, saying he was calling from the cockpit of a Boeing 707 full of food, and needed to know where to take it. In the background, I could hear the high whine of jet engines. “Just say where,” he was yelling, “which airport, and how I get approval and flight clearance?” It was not that unusual.

At this time, Ethiopian expert Paul Wenke and I had been invited to a town hall meeting at Meridian House to talk about the emergency and solicit donations. Knowing that Ethiopia had been the largest Peace Corps program under Sergeant Shriver, Wenke, at the end, asked a question of the over-crowded five hundred people assembled. “How many here,” he said, “are former Peace Corps Volunteers who served in Ethiopia in the past?” To my surprise, over half the hands went up. One of those stepped forward, saying he could probably talk for most of those with their hands raised, saying he was ready to take immediate leave from his investment firm in order to go back to Ethiopia to help out. Everyone was nodding yes, they were ready. I was not surprised that Ethiopia meant so much to them. Ethiopia always affected people that way. It was a country that stayed with you forever.

The United States had taken a lead in meeting the crisis. We had engaged the United Nations’ World Food Program, diverted our ships carrying food to Egypt and the Indian sub-continent, and organized the international relief organizations, assigning responsibilities to meet the challenge: CARE would do overall administrative coordination, Save the Children, World Vision, and others would set up feeding camps in specific Ethiopian states, in Gonder, Tigray, Welo and Shoa provinces; Bread for the World and others would focus on logistics, digging wells and settting up clinics. Polish helicopters would do the high elevation food drops in the mountainous north; the Scandinavians would attempt to deliver food in war torn Eritrea; and the ICRC, with U.S. pushing, would help with that, flying its flag on convoys crossing battle lines between Eritrean and Ethiopian government forces. We would engage Ethiopian Marxist dictator Mengistu, to make all this possible. The U.S. bureaucracy, usually slow moving, in this case moved quickly, under the leadership of Peter McPherson, the USAID Administrator, and point man on the relief effort, and Julia Taft, the Director of the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance. I would sit in staff meetings he held each morning with involved U.S.agencies, and watch in awe as McPherson coordinated the effort, overcoming one “we can’t do that” after another. “We can’t divert ships in time.” “Just do it!”

There had been early policy discussions on whether we should even deliver food, with some arguing the tragedy was partially a man-made and recurring one, due to the country’s Marxist agriculture. There would be periodic droughts in the region, and no real ability to meet them, other than a band aid, without Ethiopian reforms. We would be throwing our money away. Plus, it was the Cold War, and we had lots of problems with Ethiopia, which was anti-U.S., hosting 13,000 Cuban troops, and supporting Moscow. Why prop up the Mengistu in his crisis? The State Department argued the humanitarian case, noting the longstanding U.S. policy of not playing poitics with food, no matter how bad the regime.

The matter was to be decided by President Reagan one Saturday afternoon at the White House, with the principals gathered. In order to provide background at the meeting, the State Department representative, Crocker’s Deputy, Princeton Lyman, arranged a showing of the BBC documentary, “Seeds of Despair” in the White House film room. The film, which had just come out, graphically portrayed the terrible situation in Ethiopia at the time, including several shots of starving children. Everyone watching was shocked. When the film was over and the lights were turned on, Reagan said four words before leaving: “Do whatever it takes!”

Little did I know, riding in the Boeing over Ethiopia, that I would never get to meet Congressman Leland. That night, when I was safe up at 40,000 feet, Leland and his staff were in a small plane below attempting to fly in hilly terrain in the terrible storm, taking a chance, determined to deliver food and medical supplies despite the conditions. The pilot, Leland, and four passengers, including State Department officers, died.

At one point in my tour, I found myself in Ethiopia, visiting a relief site in Shoa province in a camp run by Oxfam. There were several large tents with doctors, nurses, and aid workers working, and lines of Ethiopians sitting on the ground inside the tents, where infants were being weighed in scales. Once their weight was recorded, they were given either intervenous solution or formula, usually the latter.   These were the ones with mothers. They seemed to be okay. But, there were a large number of toddlers and infants who looked so thin, almost without any body fat, and who were at risk and being cared for.

I found myself thinking about the more desperate and crowded camps further north, in the hills and mountains, where the Ethiopian children would sit patiently in the fields surrounding feeding centers, wearing their traditional white shamas with coptic crosses hanging from around their necks, terribly hungry, but waiting patiently, sometimes hours, for their ration of food to get to them, never complaining, sometimes lying down with stomach cramps. These were the lucky ones, we were told. Their parents had not survived the difficult, three to five day trek from their small farms and villages in the mountains to feeding camps in Welo and Gonder below. Along the way, as the food ran out, they stayed behind, giving their last crumbs to their children, and pointing them south, towards the camps.

As I was about to leave the camp in Shoa at the end of the day, I noticed a mini-bus with eight nurses sitting inside. We had been introduced to them earlier. The Embassy officer escorting me said the nurses had to be rotated frequently, due to burn out and exhaustion. These were Irish nurses, in transit from camps in the north, at the end of their tours. They were being taken directly to the airport in Addis, to be flown home to Ireland for recuperation and new assignments. Some were leaving early due to the stress, and one, he said, the one who had been short with me that day, had numerous infants die in her arms in the past few days, which explained her behavior.  As we drove out, I looked back and watched the nurses sitting in the bus. They were still, not talking, just sitting there, exhausted, looking straight ahead. I think one was crying. Not one eye looked my way.  I realized they were the first heroes I ever met.

The ride:

I remember the ride with the Ambassador to the Justice Ministry, passing through the crowded streets of downtown Monrovia: the scores of street boys begging to watch people’s cars; the mangrove swamps, and downtown bridges leading to Bushrod Island, the poorest section of town, where people were crowded together in tin huts; the colonial era wooden office buildings where I would often meet with political leaders and artists; the Liberian soldiers in American green fatigue uniforms and helmets milling around the Presidential palace, market, and barracks areas; the Lebanese grocery stores sitting next to small indigenous cafes serving jallouf rice on wooden tables with checkered tablecloths, next to hotels also run mainly by Lebanese.

Riding along, I was thinking of my upcoming trip upcountry, and the pleasure of travel: the beautiful Atlantic coast outside of town, its sand beaches and the restaurant with terrace tables looking out to the sea, the sour taste of lemon on wonderful lightly breaded sole with butter oil.  I looked forward to riding in the Chevy Surburban along country roads with branch overhangs and dense vegetation all around, having rice in the village with the chiefs in the central palaver hut, with the native villagers and children looking in, and everyone sharing the same big rice spoon, enjoying the wonderful, spicy puri-puri hot chicken rice and collard greens.

Down the coast in Greenville, there were rubber plantations, and rides on logging trucks into the forest. In Cape Mount County, near the Sierra Leone border, I once swam in the ocean with two colleagues, suddenly realizing we were surrounded by dolphins riding the waves towards shore with us, the only time I ever swam with dolphins. The children of the city sat on the stone wall near the ocean, looking out to us in the sea and laughing at our pleasure, while drinking from coconuts. I thought, man, did I miss out. What an idyllic life for those villagers, remote from modern civilization. Unfortunately, the Liberian civil war caught up with them later.

The demarche:

We finally arrived at the Ministry of Justice building in downtown Monrovia. It was steamy hot inside. The Liberian Justice Minister, Wilbur Taylor, had worked himself into a tirade, as he was known to do, and this time his audience was the American Ambassador, Ed Townsend. Taylor was a lawyer, he was bright, and, like many Liberians, was a natural orator. He was on the way up, an adopted son of a wealthy Americo-Liberian family in the exclusive suburb of Paynesville. His mother was a native girl who was a servant of the wealthy Taylor family, and Wilbur was born from the union of the patriarch and the native servant who had become his “country wife.” This was not an unusual custom. Wilbur, like many such illegitimate kids, was adopted by the wealthy father and raised as his son with all the benefits of his legitimate children, including college. The mixed offspring of these unions were called “Congoes.”

The overthrow of the government in 1980 spelled the end of Americo-Liberian rule which had been in existence since the founding of the nation. Most of the Americo-Liberians, like Taylor’s father, were either driven into exile to the U.S. or into self-imposed internal exile in Paynesville, co-opted for service in the new native government, or executed. The anger of the native majority, who had been relegated to humiliating second class status over 150 years under the Americo-Liberians had come to the surface as Master Sergeant Samuel Doe and a group of native sergeants and lieutenants conducted a coup d’etat, shooting the President in his office and executing his fellow Americo-Liberian government ministers on the beach, where they were tied to telephone poles and shot by firing squad.

The United States tended to overlook this atrocity, seeing the need to maintain good relations with the new, if unappetizing government, for sake of Liberian strategic assets and support in the Cold War. We also felt we had no choice. Sergeant, later General, Doe became one of “our” dictators, brutal to his own people and totally corrupt, but a strong ally of the U.S..  Our Ambassador at the time of the coup was sickened by the executions, but felt Doe was educable. He was wrong. That did not mean, however, that we would give up on trying to support human rights in Liberia. Over time, as Doe expanded his brutality, our relations became increasingly strained.

“Congoes” like Wilbur Taylor straddled both sides, and usually, like Wilbur, chose the mother’s native side after the 1980 coup, switching allegiance out of ambition or fear. Perhaps Wilbur also harbored some hidden resentment over the treatment of his mother, and perhaps he felt it was not just that a five percent minority population ruled over the other 95 percent with total arrogance and indifference. At any rate, Wilbur was one of the brighter “Congos,” and many like him were allowed to serve Sam Doe, who needed what educated talent he could find to manage things. The Congos were always a bit suspect in the eyes of the true natives, however.

Taylor turned on his adopted father, as had many Congos, and became vociferous in persecuting Americos from his Justice Ministry position. It was an old story of hidden grievances and slights. Most likely, Taylor, who in 1980 had little resources to flee, was flattered when approached by Doe’s group, and had to go along with the new situation, rationalizing to himself that he had no real choice and had been wronged. Mainly he was ambitious and vain, and, perhaps a bit corrupt as well, wearing riding britches and German styled, dark green brushed wool hunter’s jackets with gray felt lapels. He was known to travel often to Germany, which had mining interests in Liberia. His native mother had been of the Kru tribe, closely linked to the ruling Krahn tribe of the new President. Doe probably felt he could trust a fellow tribesman to crack down on the other ethnic groups he was persecuting while promoting his Krahn-Kru rule. There hadn’t been many educated Krahn and Kru to draw from, since these tribes had been at the bottom of the pecking order under the Americos.

Despite Taylor’s henchman role for the corrupt Doe regime, we still had a feeling that he was trying to moderate some Doe’s excesses, carefully explaining to President Doe why Liberia could not totally circumvent international norms. This was risky, and he did not push it too hard, but he was seen as someone who could perhaps be a moderate force in the future.

But, on this day, Taylor seemed to have to show his loyalty to Doe, who was tiring of American human rights lectures and may have been whispering that Taylor was too effete and afraid of the West.

The American Ambassador, Ed Townsend, was, on this day, in the middle of a human rights demarche, or protest, on instructions from Washington, going through his talking points, noting “the USG’s serious concern over the downward trend of events in Liberia, including the intimidation of opposition political figures, the reported beatings of independent journalists, and arrest of candidates forming new political…”.

At this point, Taylor interrupted the Ambassador and exploded into a tirade, a five to ten minutes lecture. His face turning red, and pacing back and forth behind his desk while slapping a riding crop against his twill riding britches, he was Wilbur Taylor at his well-known theatrical and arrogant best, practically yelling that “the U.S. was hypocritical, persecuting its own blacks while preaching to others, turning a blind eye to abuses of the previous Americo-Liberian regime because it suited U.S. realpolitik interests to bolster a cruel minority, and trafficking false lies about so called Doe transgressions of law.” Taylor provided a loud point-by-point legal rebuttal to particular U.S. accusations.

Ambassador Townsend, a large African-American career diplomat, was one of the most highly respected professionals in the U.S. State Department. He was a career minister with numerous postings, and was inscrutable, quiet and diplomatic. He remained stoic throughout the Taylor tirade, sitting passively on the office couch, listening but reviewing his notes and not paying much attention to the outburst.

When Taylor finally finished, he jutted out his lower chin and looked us squarely in the eye with a belligerence and confrontational look, as if to say, “So, what do you have to say to that. Not much, huh? You can crawl back to your Embassy.”

Townsend, realizing Wilbur was through, simply picked up in mid-sentence as if the tirade had never happened, continuing to read from where he had left off,“…the arrest of candidates forming new political parties, such as the Liberian Action Party of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.” He slowly, and with no emotion or response to Wilbur, finished his talking points.

Taylor was dumbfounded. He looked at me, Ambassador Townsend’s note taker, for some show of support or expression of surprise myself. Hadn’t the Ambassador heard him? I gave Wilbur no encouragement.

Finally, Taylor let out a sigh of exasperation and reverted to being the friendly Taylor, the one who really liked the United States. He ended the meeting on a friendly note, saying the U.S. was Liberia’s closest friend, and that we have a right to complain once in a while, like brothers. Taylor and Townsend shook hands, but there were no smiles as we left.  Townsend, without saying anything, had, through his demeanor, illustrated the dignity and position of the United States.  Our problems, however, were just beginning.

It was Saturday morning.

Leavitt, the American Chargé d’affaires, was in his office on the second floor of a villa converted into the American Embassy in downtown Minsk.  The building had originally been the residence of the top Soviet general in Byelorussia, or White Russia, after the World War II.  Now, the office windows were sealed and taped, and the Chargé could barely see out to the Russian Embassy next door. The town was silent, typical for a Spring weekend.

No one else was in the Embassy except for the Marine guard at “post one,” sitting in his glass booth at the entrance. Leavitt was composing a cable to the Department, which he would send out on Monday.  It would review the latest developments on the proposed Russia-Belarus Union.  This was not the type of cable you ground out in a few minutes; it required some thought and reflection, the type of thing you did on weekends, when the phones were not ringing and there were no appointments on the calendar. It was a typical weekend in the life of a Foreign Service Officer. He had a diplomatic reception to look forward to that evening.

The Embassy was quiet.  Leavitt walked down the stairs out the back door, through the courtyard and around to the family liaison office in the basement of the Embassy.  He pulled a bottled Coke from the refrigerator, a reward for spending his Saturday working.  Noticing some catalogs, Lands End, L.L. Bean, and the other lifelines for FSOs abroad, he was tempted to sit down and look through one, but knew he was just stalling since he really didn’t feel like working on such a beautiful day.  He walked back upstairs, through the courtyard, and up to this office, aware that he was being watched by the cameras.

Since the Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam embassy bombings, Leavitt had been devoting a lot more time to security issues, even taking daily walks around the block just to observe, relying on his seven years experience living in the region and trusting his instincts to notice anything unusual, paying particular attention to individuals in passing cars. He had also asked the Belarus government for extra support, and when they hesitated, he called on the Russian Embassy next door, showing their Ambassador photos of damage done to buildings next to the American Embassy in Nairobi. He knew the Belarusans would not say no to the Russians on this.

It had been a long tour, and one Leavitt had disliked from his first day in country.  The bilateral relationship was adversarial. He had been rushed out to Minsk to take over after the Ambassador had been recalled to Washington.  Belarus, tiring of human rights criticism, had forced European and American ambassadors to vacate their residences.  The U.S. and Europe had responded by withdrawing their ambassadors and placing sanctions on Belarus.  Unfortunately, Europe had sent its ambassadors back.

This downturn in relations had been accompanied by an even sharper deterioration in the Belarus’ human rights environment. There were a number of disappearances of opposition political leaders and attacks on others. Clips were appearing on the government-controlled television station, saying the American Ambassador, before he left, had passed out money to dissidents under its democratization programs. Not long after, NATO began its Kosovo bombing campaign against Serbia, making the U.S. even more unpopular in Belarus, where the Serbs were seen as Slavic brothers.

Leavitt had taken a tough stand on human rights from his arrival, showing the flag. His first act was to visit a Belarusian democrat who was recuperating at home after being attacked by “skinheads” at a local metro stop. He worked daily with the local OSCE office to protect threatened opposition leaders, and delivered frequent harsh human rights demarches to the Foreign Ministry. He asked tough questions at Belarusan government press briefings.

On this day, Leavitt knew he needed to be near the phones, since a large opposition rally was taking place at noon, and his deputy, Tom Hayes, was downtown covering it. Leavitt was concerned that Hayes, always zealous in covering human rights, might get a bit too close to the action. Hayes’ car window had recently been smashed outside his apartment, a not so subtle warning, and Leavitt advised Hayes on this day to stay across the street from the rally, a block away if possible.

The Marine at post one didn’t need to be told why Leavitt was in the Embassy with his car and driver standing by. It was not really to write some cable, but to take care of the troops. Leavitt was close to the Marines.  He helped them obtain a new Marine House residence, and was the one they often asked to pin on their Sergeants stripes when promoted.  Leavitt would always remind the Marines that he had once been a Sergeant as well, in the Army, to which the Marines would always reply, “doesn’t count sir.” It was the standard joke between them.

During the U.S. bombing campaign in Kosovo, the Marines had been targeted by a local government-controlled newspaper, claiming they were the advance guard for a future U.S. attack on Belarus like that directed against Serbia.  Leavitt had charged down to the Foreign Ministry to put an end to such reporting “which could stir up local citizen anger against off-duty Marines.” The Ministry gave the usual answer that it had no control over the “independent media,” and Leavitt told them “we both know it isn’t independent,” and the U.S. certainly would not place negative articles in the Washington Post which could lead to attacks on Belarusan Embassy staff there.  No more articles criticizing U.S. Marines appeared.

Leavitt continued to work on his Russia-Belarus report while awaiting a situation report from Hayes.  At about 1:00 p.m., a call came in on his line.

“Yes, Jeff,” he said to the Marine at Post One.

“Sir, I am transferring a call from Ambassador Faulk.”

Ambassador Faulk, a retired German diplomat, ran the local OSCE office. He and Leavitt had known each other since 1981, when the latter was a junior political officer in the American Embassy in Moscow, and Faulk was the German Ambassador. Faulk spoke English with only a slight accent.

“Hello, John,” Faulk said, calling Leavitt by his first name, “I am calling to see if you have heard anything on the demonstration.  From our sources, the rally was peacefully dispersed with no incidents.  The police were restrained, as were the demonstrators, and no arrests were made.”

“Yes, Ambassador Faulk, that is what we hear.  Hayes just called in to the Marine.  He is on the way back.”

“Good,” Faulk continued, “I am meeting with the European Ambassadors this afternoon to draft a report to Vienna.  It appears the local police have shown some moderation.  I will let you know what we report.“

“Thank you, Ambassador Faulk, but the key point is that the protest was not approved in the first place, not that the marchers were dispersed gently.”

Faulk said “of course,” and signed off.

The Chargé had the greatest respect for Faulk, but he could envision the European report. The French and German Ambassadors, both of whom wished to tread softly with the Belarusians, had the upper hand in the EU, and they were still smarting over what they saw as U.S. moralizing diplomacy which had almost got them all kicked out of Belarus for good.

At about 4:00 p.m., while debriefing Hayes who had just returned from the demonstration, Leavitt received a call from the Personnel Bureau in the State Department. Hayes started to get up, but Leavitt waved him to stay.  It was probably some routine matter.  But, it was strange that “Personnel” would be calling on a Saturday.

The person on the other end of the line identified himself and said he was calling to inform Leavitt that the promotion list had been finalized, and, although it hadn’t come out yet, Leavitt’s name was not on it. Since Leavitt had not been promoted for six cycles, he would be forced to retire under the Department’s mandatory “up or out” policy.  Leavitt “no doubt knew that.” The current procedure, the caller added, was to give individuals an early heads-up before the list was published.  Leavitt could stay at post until the end of his tour, two months away, or leave service now if he wished.

Leavitt responded that he was inclined to stay to the end of his tour since there was unfinished business here, and the European Bureau would probably want him to stay on until a replacement arrived. Leavitt signed off, saying “thank you for the call, I was planning to retire at the end of the tour anyway.”  At this point, Hayes, with a long face, got up and left the room.

Leavitt hung up and picked up the Wall Street Journal lying on his desk. He had not had time to read it.  Opening the paper, he noticed a BMW automobile advertisement on page two.  Yes, retirement would be fine, he thought. He had taken tough assignments, and felt good about his twenty-five year career. Leaning back in his chair, he thought about Interstate 40, running between Albuquerque and Santa Barbara, through Gallup and Flagstaff, as far as Barstow, a drive he loved to make. Yes, I’ll be going home to New Mexico he thought.  He was going home, to the American West, where he always wanted to be.  It had been a long time getting back.

An hour later, after finishing the Russia-Belarus cable and calling Washington with the demonstration results, Leavitt packed up for the day, spinning the dial on his safe a second time to be sure.  He walked slowly down the stairs to the entry where the Marine post was located, wondering if Hayes might have said something to the Marine on duty.

This time, all the Marines were there, each shaking his hand as he left the building.  No words were said.

It was the first day of spring in Minsk.  I was the American Charge d’affaires in Belarus, accompanying a visiting American citizen to meet two elderly Belarusian women who had sheltered his father during the Holocaust. The visitor had flown in from New York for this purpose.

We drove north for two hours, arriving at the family’s ancestral village. After meeting the mayor, we proceeded to a modest house on the edge of town where the American’s father had been sheltered as a young Jew in Nazi occupied Byelorussia, hiding in the barn of a local family for almost a year before escaping to the partisans. The whole neighborhood was waiting in the road as we arrived, a crowd of about thirty people, shaking our hands as we emerged from the van.

The two sisters who had risked their lives to shelter the Jewish boy were now in their eighties, small and frail, but still looking healthy. They emerged from the house wearing scarves and plain white cotton dresses, hugging the visitor from America, and taking him on a private tour of the barn to show him where his father had been hidden in the rafters.  Afterwards, in the kitchen, we all sat around for tea. They told how scared they had been at the time. Discovery would have meant death for the whole family. The Germans made numerous sweeps through the town, asking if anyone knew of Jews being sheltered.

Some of the neighbors in the street described the day the Holocaust came to their town in 1942, when a local forest ranger rode up on his horse and warned those who were Jewish to leave immediately since the Germans were coming the following morning to kill them. This news was so shocking to be unbelievable, since nothing like this had happened before.  Half of the Jewish inhabitants left their homes to hide in the forests. The next morning, the remainder were rounded up.

After a couple hours, we loaded back into the van, saying goodbye to the sisters, and driving very slowly down a narrow road going back towards town.  At one point we stopped the van and got out, and the American visitor told me his father was one of about fifty Jews who had been marched under guard along this road after the roundup. He pointed to a culvert beside the road, where his father, a boy of fourteen, had jumped unnoticed and hidden as the rest of the group was being marched away.  We then walked along the road which the Jewish column, minus his father, had followed for another 300 yards, to an abandoned cement factory on the right enclosed by high cement walls.  As we walked into the factory grounds, our guide told us that this was the spot where the Jewish column had been stopped, lined up, in the center of the courtyard, and shot. The guide said the Jews knew what was going to happen beforehand, but I wasn’t so sure. The visitor’s father, hiding in the culvert, must have heard the shots.

Getting back into the van, the mayor’s assistant took us on a driving tour to three other villages along a narrow asphalt road which curved through the region. We stopped at three clearings in the forest, sites where local Jewish inhabitants had also been marched behind their rabbis, and shot.  At each site, metal markers listed the names of the 50-100 Jews who had been killed, young and old, women and children.

On the way back to Minsk, I remained quiet, and I could see our visitor was lost in thought at the emotional revisiting of his father ‘s childhood.  We stopped along the way in a former Jewish shetl, the hometown of Israeli President, Shimon Peres, walking through the Jewish cemetery which was overgrown and surrounded by a low, black wrought iron fence.  Many of the 500 or so headstones had fallen over.  I thought of the young Shimon Peres joining the partisans and later emigrating to Israel and joining the Hagannah.  I had met him on my first tour in Israel.

The visitor flew home the next day, and I was left searching for answers, my mind stuck in the cement factory courtyard.

It was October.  We were returning to Belarus after a weekend in Lithuania. We had just missed a thunderstorm and there was an after the rain stillness in the air.  The sky was balmy, dark and purple, but parts of the landscape were illuminated here and there.  The highway was wet, speckled with damp yellow and orange leaves blown by the wind.  Dirt roads leading off the highway were puddled.  There was a musty smell in the air.

To the right, looking west in the direction of the Baltic Coast, were flat fields of tall, straw-colored rye far as you could see. The sun was breaking through in the distance.  This terrain extended fifty miles, to where the forests of Kaunas began, followed by marshes, then the Lithuanian port of Kleipejeida, which used to be Memel in East Prussia.  To the east, in the opposite direction, the sky was still dark purple. Low rolling hills stretched off toward Smolensk and Russia, one hundred miles away.  There were spires in the distance, and some of the distant hillsides were forested. On this side were scattered Lithuanian farms, with dark brown barns and matching fences, and farmhouses painted white.

We finally arrived at the Lithuania-Belarus border crossing, the divide between the the newly free and democratic Lithuania and the authoritarian Belarus, where we were stationed at the U.S. Embassy.  We came first to a modern “BP” filling station, then took a small jog to the right, to Lithuanian customs.  The Lithuanian border guard, unarmed and wearing a sharply pressed light blue uniform and forage hat, smiled and waved once from the wrist, as if to say “go ahead, no problem.”

Next, we came to the Belarus side and their customs check. We pulled into a line of cars amid Belarusan Border Guards wearing camouflaged fatigue uniforms and field jackets. They had pistols hanging from their belts. The guard asked for our documents, passports and vehicle registration. There were soldiers with shouldered rifles milling around.  The border guard checked the documents, then took them around the corner into the customs building.  He was gone for about ten minutes.

From our car, we could see the empty strip separating the Belarusan and Lithuanian sides. In that area, towards the Lithuanian side, were a number of crosses memorializing Lithuanian border guards who lost their lives to Soviet special forces during Lithuania’s 1991 independence uprising.  I could remember the televised images of the black-clad, Soviet forces in Vilnius, wearing black berets and armed with snub nosed assault rifles, attacking the civilian protesters. What stuck with me was the violence of it, like when you saw your first school yard fight. The soldiers were smashing people with their rifle butts, bashing them repeatedly and strenuously, wanting to inflict hurt.  I couldn’t imagine western soldiers doing this to civilians. It showed how people could become brutal by being brutalized in a less humanistic system.

While we were waiting, a black Russian “Volga”, the type of car used by Belarusan government, pulled up with a driver and two men in the back seat wearing suits, probably Belarusan officials returning from business in Vilnius. The driver, wearing a suit also, walked into the hut with three passports on his own, and came out almost immediately, starting the car and roaring off with a cloud of white smoke from the exhaust pipe.  I didn’t see any families crossing at the border.  The traffic was mainly foreign businessmen and diplomats, and large trucks representing Finnish and German shipping companies. The trucks were lined up for a mile, with drivers standing around outside their cabs smoking cigarettes and talking to each other. No one seemed to be waiting on them. I had heard they could wait there two days.

After about ten minutes, the border guard came back, and handed back our passports with a suspicious but “resigned to dealing with foreigners” look, then pointed to the highway, meaning “move on.”

“Why are there so many trucks?” I asked.

He shrugged and said in an unfriendly voice, “you’ll have to ask them.”

As he was talking, a more senior Border Guard officer walked by and overhead this answer.  He walked to the car and looked with irritation at the junior Border Guard.

“Passports,” he said to us, holding out his hand?

I handed them to him without saying anything.

After thumbing through the pages, he looked up and said “I don’t see the original entry stamp into Belarus.”

“We came by Lufthansa in August of 1998. I think the stamp in on the last page.”

He flipped back, and nodded yes, “What is it you need to know about the trucks?,” he asked suspiciously.

“Just curious why there are so many,” I replied. He looked for s second at me and past me through the window at my wife, then handed back the passports, and walked away. The younger guard motioned us to leave.

As we proceeded down the highway to Minsk, I noticed that a military jeep had pulled out from border control and was following us at a respectable distance.

We were on a flat plain now inside Belarus. There were collective farms along the roadside, dilapidated houses and shacks, and some long chicken coops and pig stalls. No one was working. We passed a cart being pulled by a horse, with an old man holding the reigns, and then a couple of small, older gray buses of the type belonging to collective farms. Older men and women looking like peasants were the passengers, looking straight ahead, the women wearing scarves over their heads and the men various caps.

Along the way to Minsk, we came to a new “Tesoro” filling station, one of the first Western chains to open in Belarus, with twelve pumps. It was modern, with the glass and plastic look, and with a red and orange logo. There were a couple of cars parked in front of the office, but none at the pumps. We had half a tank, but I decided to gas up since gas was always hit and miss in Minsk, and there were lines. After pulling in, I noticed the jeep behind us do a U-turn and head back the opposite direction, back to the border.

I pulled up to a pump, but nothing happened when I lifted the nozzle and squeezed the handle. The digital numbers on the dial still read “000.” I walked inside and asked the person on duty if I could get gasoline. He told me there was no gas. “The truck hadn’t come.” With no apologies or further ado, he went back to his paperback.

Later, down the highway at the half way point to Minsk, we passed over the Berezhina River where Napoleon’s troops were defeated on their retreat from Moscow in 1812.

Further on, we passed a small village with onion domes and wooden houses off to the right.  Sheri had visited this village on an embassy tour and told me how the German army had surrounded the village one morning in early 1942, massacring all the Jewish inhabitants, herding them into the synagogue and setting it ablaze.  It had marked the beginning of the Holocaust in Belarus.  We had seen numerous  other “killing sites” in Belarus, usually a forest clearing or an enclosed cement factory yard where the Jewish villagers had been marched under guard, with the local Rabbi at their head.

After an hour more, we were approaching the outskirts of Minsk, starting to see clusters of high-rise buildings called “Micro-regions,” bedroom communities which combined everything you needed, kindergartens, schools, restaurants, grocery stores, and apartments– like LeCorbusier’s urban plans– all grouped together.  But it meant people had to travel 45 minutes to get to the factory in town on overcrowded city buses. You would see them bundled and hanging from the doors in winter.

We passed over the outer “ring road” which circled Minsk. Cars had pulled off onto sidings to purchase “shashlik,” or shish-kabob, from roadside stands.  In the forests around Minsk, were what used to be “Young Pioneer” summer camps.  There were small lakes all around the capital, with modern, white-stuccoed, high-rise hotels on them.  Built as vacation spots for the Soviet collectives, they seemed to be the preserve of the new business mafia.

Soon, we were entering the center of Minsk, the capital, on a broad, tree-lined avenue.  We were on time to pick up Natasha, a Belarusian friend, and take her to dinner.  We had told her we would be back in town around 5:00 or 5:30.

The main street was lined with the neo-classical, Soviet-era masonry buildings containing offices, stores, and prized apartments occupied by former high party officials and bureaucrats.  As we continued, interspersed with the Soviet era stores and factories, were some newer Western stores and businesses, a MacDonalds, a pizza parlor, and an Eve Arden cosmetic salon.  The older Belarusans on the street were dressed for the most part in Soviet-era suits and dresses, but you also saw a few Western track suits and sweatshirts. Veterans wore their World War II valor ribbons over the jacket pockets.

There was little individualistic behavior, no berets, baseball caps, backpacks, or dogs on leashes.  No clowning around among the teens walking together in groups.  The exception was the McDonalds restaurant, a western oasis, which was lively, with crowds of young people flirting and laughing. Even Belarusan mothers relaxed with their children there and took on Western demeanor.  It seemed that it didn’t take much to make a change in people, just a McDonalds. The restaurant was always full, despite the fact that President Lukashenko had complained about the prices and said that the counter help appeared to be “smiling all the time for no good reason.”

We pulled onto a side street and saw Natasha standing on the curb waiting for us. She was dressed nicely and wearing a Western style blue LL Bean overcoat. We got out of the car, Russian style, and exchanged formal greetings, hugs and kisses on the cheeks, then we all got into the car. Natasha was particularly happy to see Sheri, since most of the time I just saw Natasha for business lunches.  She was an artist and active in the human rights community. USIA had sent her on more than one exchange to the U.S., where she had obviously purchased the overcoat.

“Natasha, how are you doing? I asked in Russian as I started the car.”

“Oh relatively fine, Randall, but things are a bit difficult as you know. Since we organized the human rights watch group, there have been more unpleasantness.  My telephone has had many calls with no one on the other end. I am under observation.”  Seeing our concern, Natasha lightened the conversation and smiled.  “But,” she said, “there is nothing to worry about. We are accustomed in these things. Such is our life.  Plus, my brother-in-law is staying with me for now.”

I hadn’t said anything, but was getting a bit worried that Natasha was becoming too visible.  There was talk of her being recognized by Amnesty International in Europe, and that could create problems for her at home.  Belarusan opposition leaders had been beaten and their offices broken into and ransacked.  Some regime opponents had disappeared.  The last time Natasha and I had lunch downtown, we were followed by two watchers.

I steered the conversation away from business.  “So Natasha, where would you like to eat?  How about the cafe in the basement of the Labor Federation Building.  Would you prefer somewhere else?”

“Oh, that is good.” It was obvious she was more interested in getting together than the dinner.

We parked in front of the large Labor Federation building, which was empty except for a night club on the main floor. We walked down the empty stairs to the cafe, a small one-room affair with checkered tablecloths and six or seven small tables. There were two young couples sitting at tables engrossed in themselves. We took off our coats and handed them to the hostess, a middle aged, stylish woman, who was the owner and helped the two young waitresses.

While we were standing at the entrance and the the owner was hanging up our coats, eight young men in short black leather coats appeared in the doorway and rudely pushed past us, bumping our shoulders, quickly occupying the few empty tables, hanging their jackets over the chair backs. They sat at the tables looking at each other, not saying anything. The owner didn’t give any indication that anything was amiss, although she certainly understood the situation.  I had experienced this type of thing before in the former Soviet Union.

Sheri looked at me as if to say “don’t start anything.”  Natasha said “perhaps we should just go somewhere else.”  She didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of disturbing our outing.  “There is “Metropolitan Pizza” across the street,” she said cheerfully.

So we got our coats from the owner without any discussion, and left the cafe, walking across the street to the larger, new western style restaurant, one of only three or four in town, with its three large dining rooms and salad bar.  The men had not followed us, but I knew there would be others available if they wanted to continue to harass us. I was guessing they wouldn’t, especially at a major restaurant owned partially by an important Belarusan businessman and full of foreigners. They would probably send one or two followers to watch us.

Metropolitan Pizza’s decoration was modern, with Slavic touches, like the carved wooden trim and large wooden beer keg.  We avoided talking about what had just happened across the street, and spoke instead about artists in Belarus. Natasha actually seemed more relaxed than we were. She had dismissed it as more of the same.

The waitress handed us menus, and asked if we wanted something to drink. We ordered Cokes and Natasha ordered juice. We went to the salad bar, but I was unimpressed with the meager selection and returned to our table at the window, waiting for Sheri and Natasha to complete their salad bar excursion.  I looked around to see who was there and who might be watching. There was nothing unusual, just a few couples, a table of middle-aged men in suits and ties, and a couple of mafia types with their girlfriends. The waitresses were young girls and attractive, and dressed modestly in dark blue skirts and white peasant blouses. They were businesslike but cordial, but didn’t go in for small talk with customers.  The service seemed somehow out of place, an attempt to act the way they thought foreign waiters would, even smiling, but without the spontaneously. None of the staff talked to each other. They just stood quietly in front, waiting for customers to come in. They were constantly looking for signals from the manager, who was friendly with arriving patrons, but whose eyes were also always moving.

From our table, I looked out at the city square across the street. It was bordered on three sides by massive buildings. The first was the new, but uncompleted Parliament building, glass and marble, much like the Palace of Congresses in Moscow. It had been started before the Soviet Union fell apart as a showcase for the Supreme Soviet legislature and Party Congresses. Construction had been halted by Lukashenko, who had need for a legislative branch. The second massive building, which we had just come from, was the former communist labor federation headquarters, built in the 1950s by German prisoners of war, who had been held to rebuild the downtown areas which the Wehrmacht had destroyed a decade earlier. The style was neo-classical, with massive Doric columns. Independent unions were also something Lukashenko didn’t need, seeing how “Solidarity” had evolved in Poland.  The third building was the World War II museum, a massive concrete structure. Near it, on a mound in front, was a green Russian T-34 tank with Cyrallic lettering and white numbers painted on the side, the first tank to enter the city with the liberating Red Army in 1945. World War II was ever-present.

After our dinner, we dropped Natasha at her apartment, but we were worried about her. We told her to call us if she ran into any problems. As we left, we noticed a tan Volga automobile with two men in it across the street.  I saw that Natasha had also noticed it, but she gave no indication.  She smiled and said goodbye, walking quickly to her building.  Her brother-in-law, I observed, was looking out from her window above.

Because of the insurgency, about the only way to get around Mozambique was to take small planes. The roads were dangerous due to the threat of ambush by RENAMO guerrillas. Cars went in convoy, accompanied by soldiers in trucks. This applied to the highways to South Africa, upcountry, and along the coast from Maputo to Beira.  Outside the capital of Maputo and the major provincial capitals, nowhere was safe.  You never knew where the rebels would hit.  And, they were vicious, taking no prisoners or  torturing captives.  So, we flew. The views of Africa from above were always great.

Today, we were scheduled to fly a twin engine Cessna operated by the UN’s World Food Program to the small up-country city of Macaze in central Mozambique.   Like most of the countryside outside the capital, the area was controlled by FRELIMO government garrisons in the daylight.  But, at night, it was a different story.  Occasionally, RENAMO would dare to launch attacks against the smaller regional capitals, even in daylight.

I saw how unsafe it was on a previous trip upcountry. I had flown with the Ambassador to Tete Province in the north, near Malawi, and walked around the almost manicured small town, still looking Portuguese colonial, with white rocks marking the borders of lawns, trees painted white half way up the trunk, and small stucco houses whitewashed. Escorted by a local military convoy, we drove about twenty miles into the bush, moving along a dirt road in the heat of the day to visit a nearby village and talk to the market ladies there. It was an interesting picture, us in the Mayor’s vehicle and four green military trucks loaded with soldiers in the back trailing us. The Mayor had told us this was a safe area, but the soldiers’ faces told us otherwise. We stopped two times in route, because the soldiers thought they saw something. The visit to the village was shorter than expected, and one of the Mayor’s staff told us we were heading back early to be safe since they didn’t want to put the Ambassador in danger.

At the time, RENAMO was not happy with the U.S. government, which was viewed by them as pro-government. They were angry that we didn’t take them seriously as freedom fighters and that we had just published a detailed report cataloging their atrocities committed against civilians. It was no secret that we were increasing our aid to the FRELIMO government and listening to the Mozambican President’s claims that he was open to democratizing. This was before we started facilitating peace talks.

The purpose of the trip to Macaze was similar to that previous trip to Tete, for the Ambassador to see some U.N.-sponsored vegetable farms supported by USAID funds. She would show the flag and evaluate the project. Going with us was the American Embassy military attache, a Mozambican employee with the USAID office, and a former Mozambican Minister of Agriculture who had come over to the Embassy.  I was coming along to see the country and our programs as part of my orientation visit to the region. I was the Mozambique Desk Officer in the State Department.

I was used to flying in Africa, and had taken a lot of flights around southern Africa, most recently from Nkomati Port in South Africa just across the border from Mozambique, where locals sat on lawn chairs next to the small runway to watch small Cessnas and Pipers come and go.  A week before, I had flown in a twin engine Fokker from Lilongwe, Malawi to the refugee camps on the Mozambican border near Blantyre, clipping tops of trees on the edge of the dirt runway when we took off.  You never knew what to expect, but it would always be anything but routine.

The village of Macaze was said to have a population of about seven-thousand. It was in the central part of the country about 500 miles to the northwest of the capital. We would fly up the coast for about two hours, almost to Beira, over sugar cane fields, then turn west, inland, for another thirty minutes to the Zimbabwe border region, an area of rolling hills and grasslands bordered by the wide Zambezi river and mountains rising to the north. Further west, on the Zimbabwe border itself, were more forested regions. To the south was mainly scrub. There had been cashew groves, but these had been hit by the rebels to hurt the export economy. The skies were light blue and cloudless as we taxied out. In the far distance, to the West, there were a few high billowy cumulus cells, and these had a habit of forming into thunderstorms in the summer evenings.

The World Food Program pilot went through his checks with the Maputo airport tower as we turned onto the runway for takeoff. The engines began the high “whir” and off we rolled with a release of the brakes. As we were taking off, we could see the hulks of the faded red and white Antonov and Iluyshin passenger planes which were being cannibalized to keep the few newer planes of Mozambican Air Lines flying. We quickly gained altitude, being pushed upwards at times by the thermals. Quickly the land fell away and we could see the highways and buildings below, the cars and trucks barely visible moving along the side roads. The view to the right, on my side, was of the Indian Ocean, a mixture of turquoise and blue. The sun’s rays created a glare on the surface, but the feeling was one of peace as we flew smoothly north, the only sound the mild drone of the engines. Below me I could see we were following the coastal highway, a two lane concrete strip that ran straight north with few bends. There were no villages.

About two hours into the flight, we were bumping along, encountering what the pilot called clear air turbulence. We would be flying level, and suddenly be pushed up a few hundred feet or else have the bottom drop out for a few seconds, dropping, then climbing back up quickly. The pilot, looking at his notes on the control panel, and recognizing a landmark below where the railroad tracks went towards the interior, banked the plane gradually to the left, and we headed into the West. The sun was still pretty much straight above us, so we weren’t flying into it. The day was still clear and it made for great viewing below. We could now see the rail line making its straight line into the denser foliage and occasional small villages of maybe thirty or forty small houses. There was a dirt road off to the right, my side, to the north paralleling the tracks, and you could see a few specks on it, no doubt trucks heading inland.

We cruised along, everyone quiet, the Ambassador, a long time Africa hand, sleeping in the co-pilot seat, and after some time, the attache on my left asked me how long we had been flying. I said three hours. He raised his eyebrows and said he thought the flight was only two and one-half hours. I shrugged my shoulders, but noticed that the pilot reached over in the glove compartment in front of the co-pilot’s seat and took out a large plastic laminated map folded into eight inch squares. He unfolded it and laid it out on his lap and found the area he was looking for and looked at the map, marking a spot with his index finger on it, and looking down out his side window at the landscape below, trying obviously to get a fix. We were no longer following railroad tracks. I looked at the gas gauge, which was located on the floor between the pilot and co-pilot’s seats.  It said a bit over one half. We flew on for a while longer, and the pilot looked at his maps again and banked the plane slightly to the north, dropping a couple of thousand feet to follow the dirt road going inland. He asked the Mozambican passenger in back if he had ever flown to Macaze before, and if that was the road to it.

The Ambassador woke up for a minute and looked at the pilot and closed her eyes and dozed back off, unconcerned.  The Mozambican watched the road below for quite a while and said he thought the correct road was further to the north, in the direction of the rolling hills to the right. He seemed pretty sure. The pilot changed course, crossing the road and flying over what now appeared to be more scrub and bush. There were no rivers or other landmarks visible. I turned to the attache, and said maybe we should suggest that we turn back and start over from the coastal highway railroad intersection. The attache said quietly, leaning closer to me, that the pilot had enough on his mind right now, and it would probably be better not to bother him.

At this point, the pilot had the full fold out map laying on his lap, and was looking mainly at the map, his hands off the controls, letting the plane fly itself on a level course. He asked if anyone knew the region, since we appeared to be lost. His voice was matter of fact. No one had been to Macaze before. The Mozambican employee said he was now less sure of the course to the north since he didn’t see any familiar landmarks. The pilot then announced that we were going down to a lower altitude to get a better look, and down we went to about three thousand feet. Now, we could see terrain and forests and a few dried creeks, and we were beginning to fly over some low rolling vegetated hills. We should have been to Macaze at least forty-five minutes ago. The pilot went back up to our cruising altitude, but we were entering a thin cloud layer that obscured the terrain, like a blanket, but with occasional patches where you could see through wispy clouds to the ground below.

But, it was getting more cloudy and the cloud bank soon appeared to cover the entire horizon from north to south in our path. The gas gauge, I noticed was just over one third. After studying the map for a few minutes above the clouds, the pilot banked slightly to the right again, to the north, and said we should cross the east-west running wide Zambezi river at some point, and that would give us a bearing. I was thinking that if we had to emergency land, the territory between Beira and the Zambezi was RENAMOs heartland, including the headquarters in the forest of Gorongoza. I also knew there were mountains north of the Zambezi and foothills to the south.

We went down again, flying slower and lower and lower through the thin cloud layer and coming out above the low rolling hills. There was a second or two when we were all a bit nervous, whited out in the clouds and descending into the unknown. We went to the north, then northwest, then west, then north again, which should mean we would have to cross the Zambezi sooner or later. After about ten minutes, after studying the landscape and a small river that we crossed, the pilot went back up above the clouds to have more room to study the map again, to compare notes from what he had just seen. Again, we seemed to be on autopilot as he sat studying the maps closely.

Finally, he folded the map and put it between the seats and said to everyone that we seemed to have two choices, either to go back down through the clouds again to look for more landmarks, or to turn around and fly due east towards the coast, and once we met it, to turn south and follow it to Beira. There, we could decide what to do, whether to try again. He said he didn’t like going down through the clouds again since we didn’t know what we would meet on the way down. The coastal option had one drawback, that if the coastline was clouded over, we would pass over it, and would be over the Indian Ocean without knowing it.  the Amassador was awake again, and said she felt we should leave it up to the pilot, that the stop in Macaze was not crucial at this point. We could always do it another day. i wanted the coast option, but the choice was clearly hers and the pilots. The Mozambican was glued to the window, looking down for patches between the clouds, no doubt just wanting to be on the ground, like all of us. He would occasionally glance over at me, his eyes questioning mine on how serious our situation really was. I smiled as if this was routine.

I knew we were not in any real danger yet, but, nonetheless, said the Christian Science prayer, the Scientific Statement of Being, to myself, always feeling that prayer can do some good. Being a Christian Scientist, we feel that we are not ruled by the material world, and can influence events by putting our self in God’s power. My aunt, a Christian Science practitioner, who knew I feared flying a bit, taught me the mantra, “Divine Life, Truth, and Love”–in other words, God– “Goes Before Me.” That always seemed to help, knowing, as she put it, that the pilot was being guided by God to do the right things and that the science of flight, inspired by God, would prevail. We just had to know the truth, to put our faith in God.

I had always been “protected,” as Christian Scientists say. I had flown thousands of miles on Air Nigeria, Air Djibouti, Somali Air, Sudan Air, LIberian Air Lines, and Aeroflot. On one night flight to Europe out of Liberia, our Pan Am DC 10, had to suddenly go to full power and pull up over the mountains near Freetown, Sierra Leone, circling around again for a second try at landing. I had been on a Sabena Airbus from Brussels to Kinshasha that had been forced to turn back over the Mediterranean due to aileron malfunction; I had been on an unscheduled quick descent in a Tupolev 154 into Vanino in East Russia due to “technical problems;” and I had flown an Ilushyn 26 whose engine blew out on a night flight from Moscow to Vladivostok. I had been on an overloaded small Yak 40 that barely made it in the air leaving Vladivostok to Khabarovsk.

In the Foreign Service, you naturally expose yourself to dangers you don’t face in the United States. I had known touches of malaria in Africa, been stung by a school of jellyfish in the Eastern Mediterranean, and been jostled by the KGB in Leningrad. In Liberia, I had stepped over a black Mamba, unknowingly crossed a crocodile infested river by foot, and been accidentally shot at with live ammunition while observing a training exercise.  I had been at a Liberian polling station where gunfire erupted, and once briefly detained by a youth militia and accused of being a spy. I had been followed in the West Bank by a group of Palestinians in a Mercedes, and been on the Haifa Highway in Israel when a civilian bus had been hijacked by terrorists who were shooting at cars on the road.  This was life in the Foreign Service.

I was recalling other incidents as we were flying, now in an easterly direction towards the coast. I wasn’t too worried, feeling if worse came to worse, and fuel got short, we could most likely put down on a road or field somewhere. We certainly weren’t at the panic point. But, I wasn’t as cool as the Ambassador, who was asleep again. The military attache seemed absorbed in his own thoughts.

As we were flying back in the direction towards the coast for about twenty minutes, I noticed that the solid blanket of clouds below us began to thin out and we could almost see through at points. It appeared to be brown or green below the clouds, as best I could make out, which was good, meaning land. After another ten minutes, the clouds dispersed, and, at the same time, the coast became visible up ahead, stretching beautifully as far as you could see on my side of the plane. The pilot looked back at us and gave a thumbs up gesture. He banked the plane to the right, southerly, where we followed the coastline. The water was a beautiful dark blue next to the beautiful green and tan shore dunes. There was no highway, which meant we were north of Beira. Another ten minutes and Beira’s sparkling white skyscrapers came into view. We started our descent. We were now talking to each other and the Ambassador was awake. The pilot made radio contact with the tower and received landing instructions. We touched down, and the engines whirred again as they reversed. We taxied up near the hangars and gas pumps and cut the engines.

The Ambassador and pilot got out and walked over to the terminal. The pilot came back, and a fuel truck came out to refuel us as the pilot helped the ground crew and walked around the plane, making visual checks.  The Ambassador came out and said she had called the Embassy to inform it we had decided to fly back to Maputo. The Embassy was calling Macaze to explain that we would try to make the trip another weekend.

While waiting on the tarmac before heading back to Maputo, I overheard the pilot joking with the military attache about a “gut check,” saying we were lucky, that usually clouds build up along the coastline. He never really wanted to try to ditch in the ocean. He added quietly, with a knowing raise of the eyebrows, that an airport controller in Macaze had called Beira to report a small plane had been spotted on radar flying over the mountains to the north before turning east. It looks, the pilot said with understatement, like we made the right decision not to go back down through the clouds. The attache and pilot had a good laugh over this.