Foreign Service Life in Washington, D.C.
Part 3: Back on the road again--leaving Washington for the real "Foreign Circus"
As with any domestic posting in the Department of State, my tenure in the press office kept me busy, day in, day out—never a dull moment, and only a few irregular quiet ones. My first year ended in September 1988, with another 12 months to go—and my EER, submitted in April of that year, had been strong but not quite enough, as I had been warned, to warrant a promotion to FS-3 in the annual ratings race.
A word or two about the annual evaluation process might be in order. Most of them were hopelessly exaggerated—the process was so badly skewed that normal, adequate adjectives were often avoided as dangerous for a career. “Weak” language or worse, “lukewarm” ratings by the supervisor who assessed your past year, condemned you to the bottom of that year’s heap, sometimes perilously close to being low-ranked (the bottom 5 percent), left staring at the pipeline for being “selected out” for poor performance. Even those who did get promoted—often billed somewhat snidely as able to “walk on water,” so superior that Jesus Christ himself should be looking over his shoulder—knew the system was ridiculously inflated. Most EER writers knew the precise language to use to distinguish, subtly but unmistakably, between perfectly acceptable performance and out-of-the-ballpark performance—and both from substandard—and how to document the actions considered best of the best.
Much of it depends, of course, on how strong a relationship you have built with your supervisor—and how good and thoughtful a writer he or she is. I have never been great at brown-nosing—I modestly try to let my performance speak for itself—but had learned to be more practical and assertive since Copenhagen days, when an unenthusiastic, vaguely critical evaluation from my supervisor required a delicate “rescue” mission from Ted, my DCM (deputy chief of mission)—far more observant and supportive of my efforts in what he well knew was a challenging situation with a petulant ambassador—that kept me in the safer middle of the pack.
A year later, I was hoping for a much stronger showing, and got it. Both my rater and his supervisor penned far more positive, helpful evaluations; I still did not quite make the cut, but had decided, by now, to give my career at least one more foreign tour before transferring to USIA or bailing out and returning to graduate school and the private sector. The pace was quickened, however, by two unrelated events: the Lockerbie disaster and a suddenly-vacant post in a country I had barely heard of.
* * * * * *
The explosion which brought down Pan American’s Flight 103 from Frankfurt to Detroit, via London, over Lockerbie, Scotland, days before Christmas in 1988, was clearly the deranged act of a terrorist bomber. Out of the 270 deaths, nearly 200 American citizens, passengers and crew members, including 35 Syracuse University students, died in the crash. Significantly, a handful of U.S. government employees were killed—refuting the claim by some conspiracy theorists that the State Department had known in advance about the crash and warned its own employees not to fly Pan Am.
The truth was far more complicated. Apparent intelligence tips in early December had led the Federal Aviation Administration to issue a security alert for Frankfurt-US flights—after a caller warned the U.S. embassy in Helsinki of an imminent bombing—and led the State Department itself to issue a travel advisory for its European embassies. Pan Am itself, and other US airlines, were aware of the imminent threat, and Pan Am had ironically instituted a $5 security charge for passengers to defray costs of enhanced screenings (reported elsewhere as a "program that will screen passengers, employees, airport facilities, baggage, and aircraft with unrelenting thoroughness"). Whether luggage boarding Flight 103 in Frankfurt was properly screened is still not clear, but what is clear is that a bomb in luggage aboard the plane did explode shortly after takeoff from London—and the aircraft crashed in the small Scottish town forever associated with the disaster. It was later determined that a Libyan man—perhaps employed by then-dictator Muammar Qaddafi—built the bomb.
At the time, all we really knew for sure was that nearly 200 Americans had been killed in a horrific crash. As a press officer, I was soon drafted into a shift answering telephone calls from the public in the days after the crash, part of a team of “volunteers” answering callers’ honest questions and hoping to calm public fears. It was a regular crisis technique, but my first rodeo. I was not really trained in techniques for dealing with the “crazies,” as they were called, who had little better to do for kicks than call in to accuse the Department of State and me, halfway through my first after-hours shift, of being accessories to murder—that the Department callously pulled its own employees from Pan Am 103 without warning anyone else about traveling on it.
Had I been warned, I hope I would have responded “neutrally,” with time-honored “reflective reasoning” phrases—such as “I understand your feelings,” “yes, it is a national tragedy,” “we are investigating”—rather than what I did say, without thinking: something like “how dare you be such an idiot, you bloodthirsty moron.” One of the roving supervisors overheard my anger and quickly took the phone from me, and I was given a time-out. And safe to say, I never volunteered for such abuse again. But it made me wonder just how uninformed and gullible the U.S. public really was. In those waning days before social media instantly stoked the fires of conspiracy everywhere, that kind of “fake news”—half-truths twisted into public loathing of the malignant “deep state”—had not yet become as commonplace as it has become 30-odd years later—but it was enough to make me want to go back overseas.
Crazies overseas I could deal with … but at home? I felt almost like a Vietnam vet being spit on …
At about that same time, I had recently seen a circulating personnel cable for “immediate openings” at embassies overseas. An administrative section chief was urgently needed at Paramaribo, a city I am still not sure I had ever heard of before—despite my hard-earned geographic knowledge—and whose name does not exactly roll off the tongue, but which I quickly learned was the small capital city of the former Dutch Guiana. It was a onetime Dutch colony now known as independent Suriname, on the northeastern coast of South America. No language training needed; no long job training, either. A hardship post, in a geographic bureau (ARA—Inter-American Republics) I had already served in. And best of all, applicants at my grade were acceptable.
Historic inner city architecture of Paramaribo. Courtesy UNESCO
Of course, I had heard of the countries on either side of it—far more notorious Guyana (former British Guiana), with its recent Jonestown massacre, in which 900 Americans had committed Kool-Aid suicide in 1979 at the order of jungle cult leader Jim Jones, after the murder of a visiting U.S. congressman. A TV movie featuring actor Powers Boothe as the maniacal Jones had burned its image into almost every American brain.
The entrance to the tragic site at Jonestown, Guyana. Courtesy The Jonestown Institute, http://jonestown.sdsu.edu.
Then there was French Guiana, now an overseas French department, home of the old Devil’s Island made famous in Steve McQueen’s Papillon, which I have told readers about in a previous posting. Great neighborhood, all told.
And I think was vaguely aware of headlines about the remarkably unstable political situation in Suriname, one of the few ostensibly democratic Western Hemisphere nations all but controlled by a drug-using military dictator, Desi Bouterse, who had recently lost support in Parliament but skulked murderously along the sidelines. A nearly cartoonish non-shooting war—a rebellion left by a defected Bouterse aide named Ronnie Brunswijk—had recently divided the country effectively in half, with the road to the airport a sort of DMZ.
As I read up further on the country, I learned the Suriname River was home to flesh-eating piranhas and poisonous frogs. A very small country, population less half a million, modern Suriname consisted mostly of a few urban areas along the Atlantic coast near the Equator, with the rest scattered across the Amazon basin jungle—still largely unexplored—all just above Brazil. It was home to a significant minority population of (Indonesian) Muslims—among the largest nonimmigrant groups in the Western Hemisphere, apparently. English and Dutch were spoken mainly by the educated, a very small group, indeed. The majority preferred a strange patois dialect called Sranan tongo (Surinamese tongue)—a Creole-like blend of African languages with words thrown in from English, Dutch, Portuguese, Javanese (!), Hindi—all reflecting the many immigrant groups—and of all things, a bit of Hebrew.
On the plus side—and there was, sadly, very little positive to report—a Surinamese diver named Anthony Nesty had recently won a gold medal at the 1988 Seoul Olympics. And in its more prosperous recent past, before independence, it had once played host to an American aluminum company’s bauxite operation (Alcoa’s Suralco branch). Paramaribo actually had several leftover modern, U.S.-style neighborhoods. It also boasted the hemisphere’s oldest Jewish synagogue, begun in the 18th century. The capital sat just above river level and flooded frequently, especially during the monsoon season.
Well, it wasn’t called the “Foreign Circus” for nothing. What the hell. So I volunteered—one of the few who considered it—and was accepted. Margaret was astounded. So were my friends. She would stay home for a while, keeping her job and our dog, and we could meet in Miami regularly. That is why in mid-January 1989, just before our new president, George H. W. Bush, could even be inaugurated, I was on a plane to my new home, landing in the middle of the night in an airport deep in the jungle …
Paramaribo’s Zanderij Airport, officially named after Johan Adolf Pengel,
popular former Surinamese Prime Minister. Public domain photo
I began having second thoughts almost as soon as I saw the airport from the midnight sky—the only cleared patch of light in a thick jungle at a rural village called Zanderij, about an hour’s drive outside Paramaribo. The runway had apparently been enlarged for use as a World War II Allied jumping-off point to West Africa; how much the colonial Dutch or the later, scatterbrained Surinamese governments had done to maintain or improve the airport since was not at all clear. At least there was no fog when I landed—a real obstacle for many middle-of-the-night arrivals. (As I would find out months later, tragically, the government-owned airline on which I was flying—SLM, short for Surinam Airways—was little more than a poorly-run cash cow, with two leased airplanes to its name—and a disturbingly shallow pool of pilots.)
Once inside the terminal, the military-run customs and immigration service was neither particularly efficient, welcoming, nor even friendly, but then people skills are rarely nurtured by Third World bureaucracies. (Not that more civilized nations are that much better, but at least you get the feeling in the U.S. and Western Europe that they have had some training.) Even in peacetime, Suriname was no tourist mecca back then—no beaches, no amusement parks, and few hotels—and visitors soon learned to expect very little in the way of “wartime” amenities.
As an accredited diplomat, my luggage was technically not subject to search—although I had no contraband, and would hardly have objected. I learned later that much of the luggage search process inflicted on non-diplomats was aimed at ferreting out large stashes of Surinamese currency—the nearly worthless Surinamese guilder, officially pegged at the Dutch rate (about 2 to a U.S. dollar) but effectively worth about one-tenth that much on the dominant black market economy. Surinamese visitors usually sold all they had for pennies on the dollar in Miami, and it was then smuggled back into Suriname, where the eagle-eyed customs folks confiscated it, usually for pocket money—and sometimes also sent the smugglers to jail.
I soon learned that much of my job would be devoted to spending long stretches of late-night time out at the airport, meeting incoming planes. For no discernible, rational reason, our flights almost never came in during daylight hours. But whenever they came, official U.S. visitors onboard had to be ferried by Embassy cars, in lieu of taxis, down the dark, narrow un-patrolled “highway” into the city, subject to occasional bandits’ roadblocks. My ride into Paramaribo that night was blissfully uneventful, but one recent Embassy mission had ended in near-tragedy, when the vehicle rounded a curve and plowed into an earlier accident, being investigated by rare policemen, badly injuring the Ambassador’s secretary—returning from leave in the States—and knocking out both the Embassy officer and the Embassy driver sent to meet her.
Luckily, all three survived, and were still around—although the Ambassador’s secretary had to be Medevac’ed to Miami for treatment, prompting another grueling, unwanted trip for poor Dale—but their harrowing experience and painfully slow rescue was still the talk of the Embassy weeks later, when I arrived.
My job was to try to stabilize the inefficient, factionalized administrative operation of the Embassy—a large and somewhat cumbersome operation, housed in a rented building, which had fallen into hard times under my predecessor, who had been sent home under mysterious circumstances for reasons I never really had explained in detail. It sounded like an alarming combination of “burnout” and poor management skills, for she also bequeathed me a little internal “war” inside the Embassy, then located on Dr. Sophie Redmondstraat. The Foreign Service Nationals—local employees, or FSNs—were divided roughly into two camps, the ones who worked for her (most employees) and remembered her favorably (most of them), and the ones who had or had not worked for her and did not regret her departure. I had to figure out how to mediate between the two groups without alienating them both—and meanwhile, keep the Ambassador informed and happy.
Welcome to the Third World, indeed. As a Dutch colonial territory two decades earlier, Suriname had boasted one of the highest standards of living in the Americas—but by the time I got there, after a decade or so of independence, was operating on a par with the poorest of the poor, Haiti and Nicaragua, while its shabby capital, Paramaribo, was slowly being reclaimed by the jungle, as one local resident told me, sadly. It soon looked to me as if the U.S. Embassy were following suit …
Next time: Foreign Service life outside Washington—if you want a friend, get a dog