Safirka

An American Envoy

Peter Bridges

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 1996
• eBook ISBN: 9781612772400

Peter S. Bridges's service as an American ambassador to Somalia capped his three decades as a career officer in the American Foreign Service. Safirka, a frank description of his experiences in Somalia and elsewhere, offers pointed assessments of American foreign policy and policymakers. Bridges recounts his service in Panama during a time of turmoil over the Canal; in Moscow during the Cuban missile crisis; in Prague for bleak years after the Soviet invasion; in Rome when Italian terrorists first began to target Americans; and in key positions in three Washington agencies.

In Somalia Bridges managed the largest American aid program in sub-Sahara Africa. He dealt with a postcolonial regime, hobbled both by traditional clan rivalries and by a leader who cared far less about Somalia's people and progress than about maintaining his control over that poverty-stricken, strategic – which soon erupted in civil war.

one

The Interesting Possibility

It was May in Rome, a pleasant season. I sat in my office in the Palazzo Margherita, an oversized, high-ceilinged room that had once been a queen mother’s bedroom. I wished that it were Sunday and that my wife and I were making our way toward the top of some mountain in the Apennines, Monte Semprevisa, perhaps, or Monte Gennaro. The intercom buzzed, and my secretary—that marvelous lady from Boston, Maria Lo Conte—said that I had a call from Robert Oakley in Washington. Bob Oakley was our ambassador to Somalia; he was in Washington, I knew, for a few days’ consultation. We had agreed by cable that on his way eastward back to Mogadishu he would stop in Rome for lunch with people from the Italian foreign ministry. We and the Italians both had major interests in Somalia. Our interest was largely strategic, a result of the Cold War. Theirs was in good part historical; much of Somalia had been an Italian colony. We were both major donors of aid to Somalia, and we often compared notes on aid and other questions. I had done so as a political officer in the Rome embassy in the late 1960s, and I did so now as the number-two in that embassy, together with Bob Oakley whenever he passed through Rome.

Oakley was calling to say that he was going to be a few days late leaving Washington. He wondered if I could put off for a week the date for our luncheon—and of course I could. Oakley went on to say that he would soon be leaving his post. He was being transferred back to Washington, where he was to head the State Department’s Office for Combating Terrorism. “A big, hard job,” I said; “congratulations. Who’s going to replace you in Somalia?”

“I don’t think they’ve given that any thought yet,” he said. “Why, would you be interested?”

My question had come from simple curiosity, and I had not expected his question in return. I thought for a minute. “Yes,” I said, “I’d be interested.”

“Good,” said Oakley. “Let me just tell a couple of people here. See you soon.”

He hung up, and after a bit Maria came in and found me staring out the window. “Spring fever, Peter?” she asked. Not quite. What had I put myself in for?

The year was 1984, and my wife and I had been in Rome—our second time there—for two and a half years. I was the deputy chief of mission (“DCM” in Foreign Service lingo) in the big Rome embassy, with the diplomatic title of “minister.” It was the biggest overseas job, and the most interesting, that I had had in twenty-seven years as a Foreign Service officer. An American television network had recently made a film, called The Deputy, that was supposed to be about the DCM in Rome. I laughed when I saw it. It showed correctly that we had a magnificent embassy—before the United States bought it (for a bargain price), our office building had been the palace of Italy’s Queen Mother, Margherita. But the TV film did not begin to convey what the DCM did to earn his pay.

In Rome I was the deputy and executive officer to an ambassador named Maxwell Rabb, a Ronald Reagan political appointee, a New York lawyer with long experience who had been secretary to the cabinet under President Dwight Eisenhower. Max Rabb was a canny man who knew the elemental rule of politics: do someone a favor and he will owe you one. Indeed, the better I got to know him, the more it struck me that this had been the heart of his clearly very successful law practice. His string of friends and personal acquaintances seemed to include most of the influential people in the United States, and many of those in Italy.

The ambassador left to me the management of our oversized embassy —which included representatives of twenty federal agencies besides the State Department—and he also left me room to act as a senior American representative in Italy. The two of us, the other embassy officers, and our seven consuls general in other Italian cities had a wide range of personal contacts in government, politics, business, journalism, academia, and the arts. We sometimes suggested gently to Washington that ours was the best embassy in Europe and that Italy, in part thanks to our efforts, was our best ally. Sometimes, we sensed, Washington agreed.

Rome diplomatic life was not all roses. I am not just talking about hard work. Around October 1981, the time that I arrived in Rome as DCM, the Red Brigade terrorists decided to target Americans for the first time —although we did not know that. The Red Brigades had been born of the Italian student rebellion at the end of the 1960s. The 1970s had been for Italy the anni di piombo—years of lead: almost fifteen thousand acts of political violence had occurred, and more than four hundred people had been murdered by terrorists of both Left and Right. As a chronicler of the Red Brigades wrote later, Italy’s political violence was the most serious of any advanced country, other than the crazed nationalism in Northern Ireland and Spain.¹ It had reached perhaps its worst point in 1978, when the Red Brigades captured and then killed former prime minister Aldo Moro. By 1981, violence was declining; the Italian police were making inroads on the brigatisti, who had never found popular support. Perhaps, Red Brigade leaders now decided, an anti-NATO campaign would prove more popular.

On the evening of December 17, 1981, my wife and I were sitting in bed, reading, in our Rome apartment. The telephone rang. It was Sergio Berlinguer, the diplomatic adviser to the prime minister. “Peter,” he said, “the Red Brigades have kidnapped an American general. You had better send someone down to our crisis center at Palazzo Chigi.”

The kidnapped officer was James Dozier, a brigadier general stationed at a NATO command in Verona; I had met him at an embassy meeting only days earlier. In ensuing weeks we worked closely with the Italians on the case. The official responsible for terrorism questions in the Pentagon phoned to tell me that we needed to bring a lot of U.S. personnel into Italy; the Italians, who had not one but two competing police forces (the Polizia Nazionale and the Carabinieri), obviously were incapable of finding and rescuing our man. I said that there were six or eight police forces in the District of Columbia, the last time I had counted, and that the Italians had much more antiterrorism experience than we did. Still, a month after General Dozier was kidnapped, the embassy agreed to have a small Delta Force unit come to Rome. They were trim and impressive men, but none spoke Italian or knew Italy. The Italians pointed them to a town in Tuscany where they could check out a lead. Some time later I took a phone call from the police station in Padua. A strong voice said, “Hi! This is Jim Dozier.” The Italians had learned that Dozier was being held in an apartment in Padua, and an Italian team had stormed the apartment and freed him without loss of life.

But we remained under a terrorist threat. In May 1984 I lost a good friend and onetime Foreign Service colleague, Ray Hunt, head of the Sinai peacekeeping force; he was gunned down on his way home from his Rome headquarters. He was the third friend of mine killed by terrorists. Frank Meloy, whom I had worked for during my earlier tour in Rome when he had the same job I had now, had been assassinated in Beirut in 1976 soon after arriving there as our ambassador. Spike Dubs, with whom I had worked years earlier in Moscow, had been killed in 1978 while serving as our ambassador in Afghanistan. More American ambassadors had died violent deaths since World War II than generals and admirals of all our military services.

One could not let this affect one’s work. I ran several miles a day, varying my routes as best I could. When I ran around Piazza Navona at midday in my shorts and T-shirt, I did not suppose anyone knew that the runner was the minister of the American embassy. Although I had an armored vehicle, I had no bodyguard. If the Red Brigades should ever interest themselves in me, they would find me a good target. It was not a subject I brooded over.

I did sometimes wish inwardly that the increased terrorist threat might reduce the flow of visitors to the embassy from Washington; hundreds came each year, causing us a tremendous workload. But we could not in good conscience warn off visitors; terrorists usually targeted not people on brief visits but individuals whose abodes and travel routes they could study for some time. Top Washington figures were of course targets at any time, but these VIPs came with good protection. So our visitors kept coming—officials from various federal agencies, many members of Congress, President Reagan in 1982, Vice President George Bush the following year.

My first view of George Bush in Rome had come over a dozen years earlier, just after he had been named our ambassador to the United Nations. The new ambassador had made a trip to major Western European capitals, including Rome, to consult with our allies on questions of mutual interest in the UN, the Middle East above all. I was serving in Rome as a midlevel political officer. Our ambassador, Graham Martin, told us at the morning staff meeting that Ambassador Bush would make himself available that afternoon for an informal session with interested embassy officers. About a dozen of us showed up, and we stood in a semicircle as Mr. Martin introduced Mr. Bush. Ambassador Martin asked if our guest wanted to make some comments before we got to questions and answers. George Bush replied that he was happy to be here, that he had been honored when President Richard Nixon had asked him to take on this new responsibility—and that we might not like it, but that at the UN he was going to be a fierce defender of American interests and American ideals. My friend and fellow political officer Charlie Stout was standing just opposite me; as Mr. Bush continued, Charlie and I looked at each other, incredulous. We might not like it? We Foreign Service officers, who had taken an oath to defend the Constitution? Who was this bird?

To put the best possible face on it, Mr. Bush was no doubt on edge: we were professional diplomats, and he was new to the diplomacy game. But his comment was inexcusable, and I do not suppose any of us ever forgot it. Certainly I did not.

When in 1983 George Bush visited Rome again, as vice president, it was after many weeks of detailed preparations. As DCM I had responsibility in the embassy for making sure all went well and for coordinating embassy efforts with those of the many Secret Service and White House people who had come to Rome in advance to work on the visit. It had been agreed that among the vice president’s Rome meetings would be a call on the president of the Senate, Amintore Fanfani, a former prime minister and one of the founders of the Christian Democratic party, with which we were always on close terms. Bush had a pleasant meeting with Fanfani. Early the next morning, there were four people in the ambassador’s office: Ambassador Rabb, Vice President Bush, a White House staffer, and me. The ambassador told the vice president that the president of the lower house of Parliament, the Chamber of Deputies, had sent word that the vice president having called on her opposite number in the Senate, she expected Mr. Bush to call on her. Her name was Nilde Jotti, and she was a Communist. The vice president went nearly through the ceiling, which was a high one. If he did not rave, he certainly ranted. We had sabotaged him, we had gotten him into a trap—and what would the president say? What would the president say?

We told him that we did not think his call on Madame Jotti would have any consequences; we had had contacts with the Italian Communist party for a number of years. After some minutes the vice president calmed a little and agreed to go see the lady. The call resulted in modest coverage and, as I recall, no comment in the Italian press.

But now the question was Somalia, and me. I had served on several continents but never in Africa. Did that matter? The Somalis did not like to be lumped in with other Africans, and although they belonged to the Organization of African Unity, they were also in the Arab League. Every group of Somali clans claimed an Arab ancestor who had come across the water to the Horn of Africa with the new Islamic faith.

I had followed Somali affairs off and on for many years, and I knew a fair amount about Somalia and its relations with the outside world. Italian was still a useful language there, and my Italian was fluent. I had served in the Soviet Union and in Moscow’s Communist satellite Czechoslovakia; the president of Somalia had for years been one of Moscow’s closest African allies. More important, as regarded my chances of getting the assignment to Mogadishu, was the fact that none of the senior Africanists in our service seemed interested in going there.

My own dream when I reached Rome in 1981 had been to become ambassador to Czechoslovakia whenever the time came for me to leave Rome, which I assumed would be when Max Rabb did. I had, in my view at least, good credentials for the top Prague job. But my friend Bill Luers (who would later, in retirement, become the president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art) had gone to Prague as ambassador at the end of 1983 and would presumably be there at least three years. That was longer than I could expect to stay in Rome; in 1984 I was already well into my third year there. Nor did it look like there would be any other ambassadorial opening soon in Central or Eastern Europe. I assumed Mr. Reagan would continue to fill all the posts in Western Europe with political appointees, and he might well send one to Prague.²

I did not want to go on forever being a number-two—better, to paraphrase Caesar, to be first in a small place in Africa than second in Rome. Nor was Somalia small, though it was terribly poor. As the spring progressed in Rome, I kept thinking about what might be in store for me. I thought that perhaps I had been pointing toward Somalia for many years.

1. Robert C. Meade Jr., Red Brigades: The Story of Italian Terrorism (New York: St. Martin’s, 1990), p. xxi.

2. As in fact he did, when he sent Julian Niemczyk to Prague in 1986. Niemczyk was followed in 1989 by that famous former child star Shirley Temple Black.

two

Scholar, Soldier, Someday Diplomat

When I was an undergraduate at Dartmouth College, I planned to go on and earn a doctorate at Columbia University, marry some rich and beautiful girl, and teach Russian in some pleasant New England college. The Korean War was ending. I was confident that our military draft system would also end soon.

By the time I began my second year of graduate work at Columbia, I could not abide the thought of spending more than two years in New York. The city was too big and noisy, even for a Chicagoan like me. My main subject of study was Soviet literature, but nothing of interest was being written, or at least published, in the Soviet Union. Yet my professor, Ernest Simmons, insisted that those of us who entered his department in odd-numbered years (and I had entered in 1953) should concentrate on the Soviet period, while the fortunate ones entering in even years could study Leskov, Afanasy Fyet, and the creation of byliny. Besides all this, I was in love and wanted to get married, to a beautiful girl as planned, though not a rich one. I had a generous Ford Foundation scholarship, and it would pay me more if I was married, but I wanted to support my intended wife—although she was doing quite well on her own. Her name was Mary Jane Lee. Like me she had grown up in Chicago, but we had met at Columbia, where she was the first woman Standard and Poor Fellow in Columbia’s Graduate School of Business. I was wondering what alternative I might find to academia when I saw at the university employment office a poster urging students to take the examinations for the Foreign Service. The Foreign Service would certainly mean travel, and next to teaching I wanted to travel.

My urge to travel stemmed, I always thought, from my father, Charles Scott Bridges, born in 1903 as the twelfth child of a farmer in Gloucester County, Virginia. Our ancestors had been there a long time—my ancestor Simon Stubblefield received a land grant in Gloucester in 1688—but in 1912 my grandfather had had a stroke, sold the farm, and moved to Norfolk with his family. At nineteen my father signed on a tramp steamer as apprentice seaman and first saw the Caribbean and the Mediterranean. On his return he spent a year at the University of Virginia, but he wanted an international career. By his early twenties he was working out of New Orleans, selling Libby’s canned goods in Central and South America; then he was transferred to company headquarters in Chicago. For years, while my mother and my sisters, Shirley Bartow and Mary Elizabeth, and I stayed home, Gov—short for Governor—roamed the world for the company’s export department. The year I finished college, he became president of Libby, McNeill & Libby.

My mother, Shirley Amelie Devlin, was a New Orleanian whose paternal grandfather, born in County Donegal, had ended up on the Atchafalaya River, where he married into a Louisiana French family. Her other grandfather, born in the north of England, had immigrated to New Orleans and married a lady whose father had been mortally wounded at the battle of Shiloh in 1862. My immediate background, then, was all southern—I was born in New Orleans in 1932—but I grew up on Chicago’s South Side and later in a Chicago suburb, Hinsdale. Nor did I ever think of a career in the South.¹

In 1954 I took the Foreign Service written examination, a three-day ordeal, and somewhat to my surprise I passed it. Next step was the oral exam, for which I went to Washington in May 1955. Four stern examiners at the State Department su...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The Interesting Possibility
• 2. Scholar, Soldier, Someday Diplomat
• 3. From Foggy Bottom to the Isthmus
• 4. The Moscow Hand
• 5. Rome and Prague
• 6. Long Years at Home
• 7. The Way to Africa
• 8. Big Embassy, Poor Country
• 9. Aid, with Scandals and Defects
• 10. Dams, Drugs, and Dictator
• 11. New Gazas, New Greed
• 12. From Siad to Canal Street
• 13. Anxieties, Artifacts, and Bases
• 14. Disasters and Arcadias
• 15. To the Horn and Home Again
• 16. Departure, Return, Destruction
• 17. What Comes Next?
• Appendix: Somalia through the Ages
• Bibliography
• Index