Secretary of State Shultz Visits Soviet Georgia

Part 2: An unlucky diplomat almost gets left behind in a Moscow snowstorm

It was Sunday morning in Tbilisi, and I was miserable. My quick lunch in Kyiv, Ukraine, the day before had come back to haunt me in the worst way. Had I been home, I would have called in sick and stayed in bed. As a minor aide in a large trip by the Secretary of State, I had no choice but to stagger through the day, nervously scouting every stop for nearby restrooms. But then the ABC news correspondent, Jack McWethy, introduced me to Imodium—the over-the-counter wonder drug he said it had saved him more than once—and advised me to keep bottled water handy.

I somehow managed to get through the rest of the day before my scheduled Aeroflot flight back to Moscow. The Secretary was leaving on his place for Brussels and the journalists were going with him; my part in his tour of the Soviet Union was complete.

At the Tbilisi airport, I took the packet with my tickets—Tbilisi to Moscow on Aeroflot, and Moscow to Washington via Frankfurt on Pan Am—from Pat Kennedy, who represented the State Department’s executive secretariat as the trip “manager.” I was feeling tired, perhaps a bit nervous—in all my five years of official travel, I had not yet flown on a truly third-world airline, and Aeroflot, as those of you who may ever have flown on it will remember, did not enjoy the best reputation for safety or comfort.

So I sat in the terminal and watched the Secretary’s plane take off for Brussels, with his senior staff and the journalists, wishing I were on it instead. My own flight left soon thereafter. I buckled my seat belt, tried to smile at the scowling flight attendants—none as pretty as my wife, on whose Air Jamaica flights I had never felt even a bit nervous—and started counting the hours until I was home again.

That was when it struck me, when I patted my suit jacket pocket for my tickets and took out the packet Pat had handed me. But it contained no passport. I had traveled for five years as a U.S. diplomat—in the Caribbean and Western and Northern Europe—but this was the first time I had not kept my diplomatic passport on me at all times. And I recalled, with horror, that on arrival in Moscow, Pat had, in fact, collected all the party’s diplomatic passports for group processing by the Soviet immigration officials—to sidestep the hated Soviet practice, I suppose, of holding travelers’ passports until their departure.

Perhaps he had counted on me to ask for it back—or thought he had already given it back. I never thought to ask. A major glitch. I had just assumed my passport would come along with the tickets. Now instead, it was on the Secretary’s plane, bound for Brussels, and I was about to land in Moscow without it—and with no way to identify myself, officially, to any Soviet official who might growl the familiar but dreaded words: “Your papers, please.”

* * * * * *

When I had first landed in Moscow four days earlier, the air temperature had been in the low 70s, an unexpected taste of Russian spring. By the time my Aeroflot flight landed on April 25, that had changed dramatically. It was now snowing. So much for spring. I had luckily packed one warm coat, just in case—a bright green, down-filled jacket that with the air squeezed out, took up no more space in my suitcase than my dock kit. It sure came in handy during my Sunday evening stroll about a mile away from my hotel, the 34-story “Ukraina”—one of the Seven Sisters, skyscrapers constructed around Moscow by Joseph Stalin to resemble the Empire State Building in the late 1940s and early 1950s—and until 1976, the tallest hotel in the world.

The 34-story Hotel Ukraina, Moscow, facing the Moscow River, as it looked in a vintage 1967 postcard.

For all its fading architectural splendor, the Ukraina was dreary and shabby inside, and I was eager to get out of it the next day—if I could. So after getting to the hotel, I went in to action, calling an Embassy colleague, explaining my plight, and seeking guidance. I knew that no traveler who entered the Soviet Union—whether diplomat or tourist—was allowed to leave the Soviet Union without first showing the entry visas, stamped prominently in his or her passport. It would be days before my passport with the entry visa might be retrieved from Brussels.

But as my colleague speculated, the Soviet officials might relent—in the spirit of glasnost, after all—if the Embassy’s highest-ranking consular officer, Max Robinson, the Consul General, issued me an emergency temporary passport. So she called him and set it up.

So off I went, bundled up in my down jacket, and toboggan, over turtleneck, long johns, and blue jeans, to walk in the dark across the Moscow River bridge, to the old Embassy. All I had was my State Department ID badge, which I wore on a chain around my neck—and my American driver’s license. I refused to think about the possibility of getting mugged and dumped in the river midway. But I suppose I looked so much like a typical Russian that no self-respecting thug would have wasted his time.

That is exactly what the Russian military guards outside the consular section must have thought when I arrived, as they closed ranks, crossed their rifles, and glared at me. “Pasport, pozhaluysta” (Passport, please!) was all they said. Another Russian refusenik … I spoke no Russian—looking back, probably a very good thing—so I gambled that they might at least understand English, so I pulled out my State Department badge and held it up, saying “But that is why I am here—I have no passport.”

One of the two young soldiers studied it and suddenly broke into a smile—the only other Russian besides Gorbachev who did so during my week in the Soviet Union—and said, om perfect English, “Ah yes, U.S. Department of State—please, your embassy, enter.” And it was like the Red Sea parting for a very bewildered Moses.

The “old” U.S. Embassy, Moscow, as it looked in 2007. Public domain photo, courtesy Dzerod, own photo.

Max Robinson, truly the gentleman described to me, had gotten up from his Sunday dinner to perform the emergency task. He promised it would not take long—if I had a suitable photograph. Sadly, I did not. Nor did I have my regular passport, as I’d had no plans to travel anywhere on this trip for pleasure. (We diplomats had been instructed to take both when traveling for pleasure abroad outside our accredited country—and let the admitting country’s immigration official decide which one to stamp.)

That’s okay, he said, like the kindhearted social worker he had once been. If he could figure out how to operate the Polaroid camera in the consular vault, which wasn’t used too often, and never before by him, that photograph would work. The first box of film, however, was unopened but spoiled. The second box he found looked iffy—but he managed to snap a reasonable facsimile of me on the second or third try.

That left just one obstacle, he explained as he processed my new passport. Because there was no visa in it to prove I had actually entered the country legally, he needed to type out an official letter in Russian on an odd-looking Russian typewriter, explaining the situation in some detail and asking the immigration official to make a onetime exception—a rare thing in the very strict Soviet Union. He had never typed such a strange letter, and his written Russian was rusty, though he spoke it fluently. That was the very best he could do.

All I could do was cross my fingers. In the end, I would be at the mercy of that faceless bureaucrat—and Max’s sincere but tentative Russian letter. I spent the rest of the night back at the Ukraina in a panic, hardly sleeping. What if I ended up trapped in Russia for days—weeks—forever? Sooner or later I would be “outed” for overstaying my original visa, and end up in the Lubyanka prison. Like Poor Charley on the MTA, I would be the man who never returned …

So I made it out to Sheremetyevo Airport the next morning bright and early, praying—every inch the good Episcopalian, with as sincere a smile as I could muster. The snow had stopped. The skies were clear. The Pan Am flight was leaving on time. And if the immigration official accepted the emergency passport with the slightly blurred photograph, and Max Robinson’s earnest written explanation, I would be on it.

Needless to say, the diplomat was not arrested. The folks at the Pan Am ticketing desk looked at my emergency passport and the stamp allowing me to leave the Soviet Union, shook their heads, and said nothing. The flight home and stopover in Frankfurt were like a dream. I was free. Once back in Washington, I retrieved my runaway passport, which I continued to use for years to come. I never let it out of my sight again.

But I still keep that useless, temporary passport as a reminder, long after I left the State Department in 1997. Max Robinson retired a year after that in 1998, 10 years after he saved my life, and then died way too young, in 2008. God bless his memory.

Next time: More tales of North Carolina’s 19th-century African American legislators