Disneyland, Part 3

Leaving Disneyland early, bound for the chaos of the post-Soviet Union

As I noted last time, after serving just a year in Singapore, as the regional personnel officer for three U.S. embassies in Southeast Asia, I was ready to move on. Having watched the international headlines closely since arriving, I was all too aware of the excitement brewing across the old Soviet Union in 1991, as the “evil empire” once derided by Ronald Reagan began to disintegrate, and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was temporarily ousted in a failed coup before being reinstated. Almost overnight, the U.S. State Department was faced with the need to set up more than a dozen new “pop-up” embassies in the independent nations that began declaring independence, from Russia to the Baltics, the Caucuses, and the faraway “-stans” of the distant Far East.

But deciding to leave was still far from an easy call. For one, my wife and I were comfortably settled in what is probably the world’s easiest city to get used to—in Asia, at least—and she still had a lot of traveling planned: India, where some of her ancestors came from, Australia, Indonesia, all nearby. (We had at least been to Bangkok on one trip.) She would probably not be able to accompany me to my new post, at first—living accommodations in most of the new nations were scarce and prospects for acquiring them unpredictable, at best. Having already begun the process of selling our townhouse rather than renting it out again, we would also need to find a new temporary home in the D.C. area.

And there were the subtle effects on my career to consider. A tendency to change jobs too often was always seen in a negative light by future bosses and evaluators—and the Foreign Service was a notoriously prickly environment, a veritable minefield for low-level officers. This would be my second curtailment—’tho both for the much-vaunted “needs of the service,” to volunteer for so-called “hard-to-fill” positions—and there was a substantial risk involved every time you raised your hand.

One was the risk of actually getting a good boss—one who actually understood the system, graciously willing to help less-experienced subordinates navigate it—or (dreaded but more frequent) one who was difficult to work for and had no skill in managing anyone constructively. This was a hit-or-miss proposition; so far, perhaps half of the direct supervisors I had worked under fell into the “helpful” or near-helpful category. In my year, I had developed a sound relationship with both my direct supervisors at all three embassies—and in Singapore, with the deputy chief of mission and the political ambassador, who trusted my judgment, listened to my explanations, and appreciated my efforts, and wrote up my annual evaluation (EER, in the jargon). I was loath to give that up.

A little background: I had been hired to perform a very specific, very delicate task—and had successfully accomplished the major bureaucratic requirement. Dealing with the inevitable aftermath—angry telephone calls at work, then at home from a displeased “client,” who had originally agreed to the settlement, but then decided the hard-won resolution would be reversed in her favor with enough yelling—had not been quite so easy. Suffice it to say I had run out of patience with the situation—diplomatic charm only went so far at mollifying the client, notoriously difficult and relentless, who frequently complained up the chain of command when unhappy, and was insulated from any and all consequences. Everyone—at post and in Washington—knew the details. Everyone sympathized. But apparently no one could change the situation, which was intractable.

I bit the bullet and told my bosses why I was planning to volunteer for one of the new Soviet embassies—by this time, I had narrowed it down to one of the three Baltic countries, Estonia, Latvia, or Lithuania—and apologized for leaving so soon. They were disappointed but gracious; they could not change the circumstances, and my hard-won bureaucratic victory remained in place. My successor would have to deal with the angry remonstrations.

By the end of 1991, I soon narrowed the list down to the new embassy in Riga, Latvia, for which I was duly selected as the first full-time administrative section chief—my old job in Paramaribo. For this, I required weeks of consultation and specialized training in Washington, along with about eight weeks of “fast” Russian language training—enough to be able to read street signs, carry on a rudimentary conversation, at the level of a glorified long-term tourist. (There was as yet no Latvian language training yet available; I could engage a tutor on arrival if I chose to.)

Margaret and I departed Singapore in last February 1992—her tearful, me resolute, despite ominous misgivings—after grabbing one last overnight tourist stop in Hong Kong, which was still British. We made it back to Washington the same day that our townhouse sale went through—awful timing, as always—on the longest series of connected flights I had ever managed—23 hours from Hong Kong to D.C. via Seattle. On arrival, I was badly sleep-deprived; never could learn to sleep in an airplane or airport. But we bunked at first with a good friend in Alexandria—a lawyer from my days at Chapel Hill, more than 20 years earlier—and soon managed to find a one-bedroom apartment in Crystal City, just outside the capital, on the Metro line. While I navigated my consultations and language training, she fortuititously found a job as concierge with a local hotel and waited for delivery of our essential household effects; the rest would remain in storage indefinitely pending my arrival in Riga at the end of May.

Just four years earlier, I had been to the old Soviet Union for about a week: a forbiddingly dreary, perplexing environment, at best. This would be a whole new world, rather like the Wild West of the 19th century—minus the Community Party, without rhyme, reason, or sadly, as it turned out, even consistent rule of law.

* * * * * *

I discovered in Washington that groundwork had been laid for the lease and eventual renovation of an interim Embassy in Riga—a century-old office building/eye clinic on a central city park—and that most of my job would revolve around facilitating the reconstruction, slated to begin before the end of the fiscal year. One upper wing also served as the ambassador’s temporary residence, until we could locate something more appropriate. That I had never seen the building gave me some pause—I was expected to fall into line with consultants who had made the selection months before, and already moved our staff into it—and work closely with the Foreign Buildings Office at State to make it happen, on schedule, and as much as possible, within our allotted budget. [Emergency appropriations rushed through Congress the year before had to be spent quickly! Any smart manager will tell you the plan should come first, before the money … but as I was quickly to discover, like the construction of Moscow’s Stalinist-style Ukraina hotel, where I had once stayed, and its six matching “sisters” in the 1940s, our new mandate was not open to debate.]

The good thing was that I was not completely on my own—the new admin officers in my sister Baltic embassies and I were under the watchful eye of the very helpful mother Embassy in Helsinki, Finland—but nothing else in the “fudge factory” [our derisive term for the State Department’s sluggish, often tone-deaf bureaucracy] was ever easy. No precedent existed for what was being attempted here, either in scale or degree—just hiring local staff, the backbone of any well-run embassy is a competent and trustworthy Foreign Service National staff, was tricky in a post-Communist landscape. Luckily, hiring had already begun before I arrived; the interim staff I inherited were at least literate, passable English-speakers, and enthusiastic, if lacking the specific skills they would eventually need—but many, I feared, were “seduced” by the promise of steady U.S.-dollar income, even at a rough minimum U.S. wage, in a chaotic economy. Worse, sooner or later, we would have to start paying them in unwelcome Latvian rubles—successor to the near-worthless, hated, Soviet currency.

There was, as yet, no Western-style banking system in place—one was gradually developing, but none capable of providing large infusions of U.S. currency on a regular basis, with which we paid almost all our bills—except for our hotel bills, which meant standing in line at the interminable Soviet-successor exchange window with a suitcase. (!!) To remedy this meant traveling to Helsinki every two weeks to bring back the $10,000 in cash, small bills, we needed, in a jury-rigged system that gave us—or me, so far the only bonded officer on staff—occasional nightmares.

So it was exciting, and always challenging—if my still-dark hair soon began turning gray from nonstop stress—but I crossed my fingers that I was up to it. For one, I had to be my own general services officer—enough of a challenge, as I had learned in Paramaribo—and just explaining the hoops I had to jump through to my boss was time-consuming and, in truth, a bit worrisome. (Like me, the ambassador was busy learning his own job from the ground up; a political officer by training, he concentrated on the big picture, never the small details, and did not seem to grasp the fine print I was duty-bound to obey.)

But I hoped I could at least bring him along. Unlike him, I had years of hard-won retail management experience in the private sector before government—which proved, sadly, of little use in resolving dilemmas requiring mastery of a turgid, often pointlessly contradictory system of rules designed by people who had never had to follow them—and which seemed hell-bent on tying us ground-level administrative officers up in knots. Still, after nine years in various USG jobs, I had more than moderate preparation for dealing with finding the right person in Washington to help me fashion a solution. Was it enough? I wondered nightly…

Every day brought some head-scratching new problem, which no one had prepared me for—or warned me to expect—to add to the platter of yesterday’s lingering problems, like shipping my staff off for training at another U.S. embassy in Europe; I could not train them adequately on my own. Or finding housing we could legally rent and renovate, in an economy which did not lend itself to Western-style lease contracts. All but one of us were still living and eating at the reasonably modern but still dreadful Soviet-era hotel behind the embassy; the ambassador was chomping at the bit to get out of the Embassy, if restrained gently by his ever-patient wife and that wonderful old dog they had. Glumly, I began to fear that either one of them might have made a better—at least more congenial—boss; after just a few weeks, I was slowly beginning to reassess the wisdom of the leap I had so blindly made.

Not available—but I would gladly have taken this hut in the outdoor museum near Riga. Author’s photo

Somehow it helps when the whole team starts off on the same page every day. My colleague in Estonia enjoyed a far more productive relationship with her boss—a wise and funny guy who trusted her and actually listened to her before handing down orders. In her favor, Tallinn was already livelier and far more Westernized, banks and all, than sleepy old Riga—at least Kathleen had already gotten all her staff into permanent housing, and herself into a good house that seemed to be the beating heart of the Embassy staff for gatherings. Our mutual colleague in Vilnius, the nearly-medieval-looking city to the South, in Lithuania, seemed a bit harried, but still confident, during our occasional regional group meetings. We traded tips and war stories, and bolstered each other’s confidence.

I was slowly making local contacts to Riga—mainly with other Western embassy admin officers, as the Latvians still seemed suspicious of most of us, who spoke no Latvian and only “pidgin Russian,” and who could blame them? I hired a local man old enough to be my father to drive me the 300 kilometers to Tallinn, rather than fly there—more trouble than it was worth—and gradually learned his life story: heart-wrenchingly sad, he had once been a music professor, in the days before World War II, conscripted by the occupying Nazis, then imprisoned by the Soviets until he acquiesced to torture and became the janitor they decided he should be. He spoke excellent German, if little English—understood more than he spoke, thank goodness—and we generally communicated in sign language. Other than being pleasant and a very good driver, he proved exceedingly useful in one other subtle, but critical respect—on crossing the border, he was able to converse, in fluent Russian, with Estonians, after they mutually agreed to use that distasteful “lingua franca.” [Estonian, more related to Finnish, and Lettish—or Latvian, a variant of East Prussian—are mutually unintelligible. I knew neither, and only a smattering of Russian.]

On sunny days, smiling Rigans frequented one of the world’s largest open-air markets, at left. Author’s photo

The difficulty of knowing who to trust made daily life even more complicated for Americans. Russian spies seemed to be everywhere, embedded into the fragile new government, listening at every keyhole—probably having both our Embassy building and hotel rooms bugged, for all we knew—and it would take years, or decades, to wean the Latvians from the oppressive Soviet mentality that had dogged their lives for so long. I say “dogged” because that is what the Soviets called the local language—a dog’s language—and Latvians had been forbidden to speak it at all under Stalin’s occupation regime. Add to that the devastating Soviet pollution of the environment, killing off thousands of the trees Latvians so treasured, and you slowly began to understand why Latvians—even the affable, educated, Westernized ones who invited you into their homes—seemed skittish at first, still not sure just how far they could trust us. They wanted to like us, I believe, but had been conditioned to hate the West by their overlords…

Simply cutting down a tree on our leased property required permission from the authorities—and because it might be some Latvian’s specific “tree,” even then, it was risky business. I was troubled at the extent of proposed renovations to our old building—security enhancements required such heavy additions that I was worried it might sink even further into the mud and the underground river that ran just beneath a basement trapdoor. We had in-building guards—locally hired—but not enough to patrol our parking lots, such as they were, which could not be secured—and opened onto either a side street or the front boulevard along the park we faced. This made our vehicles targets of vandals; thieves smashed the window of the ambassador’s lovely new official Opel sedan to steal the cassette player, in the dead of winter. Just getting that car to the nearest dealer—in Tallinn, of course, during a snowstorm—for repairs and installation of a burglar alarm took me away for nearly a week. (And when the alarm malfunctioned, removing it required a lengthy procedure that nearly deafened me and my staff in the process—its self-contained battery eventually ran down, just not soon enough for me…)

I did manage, with a good deal of help, I might add, to stage a fairly lavish Fourth of July celebration the weekend before at a suburban park/resort—in Jurmala, I think?—which impressed a lot of local folks, including the very small but growing community of American expats and tourists. And nearer the actual date, we did hold a smaller barbecue in the larger of our two parking lots for the staff. Days later, the ambassador and his wife were scheduled to depart for travel back to the U.S., leaving the residence unoccupied and their sweet dog unwalked, so I agreed to move, temporarily, into their very nice apartment, which covered almost half of the second floor of the building.

That was just before the roof fell in on my little world.

Next time: Part 4: One innocent wrong turn leads to a life-changing disaster