My Foreign Service
career was not going well in Rome. The
embassy did not want me there. There was
a civil service employee in the State Department in Washington whom they wanted
for the job. I'm not sure why, but I
think maybe the Ambassador or my predecessor who was forced to leave by the
State Department, had picked him out.
The Ambassador wanted him and my boss the Economic Minister wanted to
please the Ambassador by getting him. Or
maybe the Economic Minister was the one who wanted him.
When the State
Department told my predecessor in Rome that he had to leave because he had
served the maximum eight years as a Schedule C political appointee, I think the
Embassy tried to get the civil service employee to replace him, but the Foreign
Service balked, because it was a Foreign Service job which should be filled by
a Foreign Service officer. Thus, I got a
call in Warsaw from the State Department personnel office, asking if I would be
willing to move to Rome and take the job.
My job was not going
well in Warsaw. I had been assigned
there primarily to oversee a joint science cooperation program, named after
Madam Curie, the Maria Sklodowska Curie Fund.
The US and Poland had signed an agreement to fund the program for five
years, starting the year before I arrived.
The first year it was funded with $2 million from each side, and
received the same amount the second year, the first year I was in Poland. Bill Clinton was President, but after the
second year, the Republicans under Newt Gingrich took over Congress and refused
to fund future years, despite the agreement between the US and Polish
governments. I still remember my last
meeting with the Assistant Secretary of the Polish Foreign Ministry who was
responsible for the entire Western Hemisphere, and who upbraided me as the representative
of the United States for dishonestly failing to fulfill formal promises that we
had made. I was ashamed of my country
and myself.
In addition, one of
my policy responsibilities in the Embassy was the environment. As part of the USAID program to assist Poland
after the fall of Communism, the US undertook a number of envonmental projects
to help clean up Poland. One was to
build a scrubber on an old coal-fired plant generating electricity for the
Krakow area. The pollution had been so
bad under the Communists that rain was turning into sulfuric acid and eating
away some of the old statues and buildings in Krakow. USAID had a big dedication for the scrubber
when it was completed; it was supposed to remove most of the sulfur from the
smokestack emissions. After a while, one
of my Polish contacts came to me and said the scrubber was not working. I didn't really want to know that, because I
did not want to interfere with the AID mission's programs, but I felt like I
had to look into it. When I did, it
turned out that he was right. The
scrubber design worked fine in the United States with the limestone found in
the US, but it did not work with Polish limestone, which was a poorer
quality. It would only work if limestone
were imported from another country, which was logistically and financially
impossible. To make matters worse, my
contact had me visit another power plant with a scrubber build by the
Netherlands, but using General Electric technology. It worked well.
I was reaching the
end of the second year of my three-year tour in Poland. The Ambassador had said that since the
cooperation program had been cancelled by Congress, the embassy did not need a
science counselor; so, I would not be replaced, but I could stay on for the
third year. About that time, the
personnel office in Washington called and asked if I would be willing to go to
Rome. That sounded like a great job,
while the one in Poland was self-destructing; so, I said yes.
Rome wanted me to
come right away, but I had one good thing going in Warsaw. As part of the US assistance program for
Poland after the fall of Communism, we (my backstop in Washington and I) got
the US Treasury to agree to forgive $10 million of US debt, if the Poles would
agree to use it for environmental purposes.
I worked with a Polish NGO, the Ekofundusz (Ecofund), to get this money
for them to use. I wanted to attend the
first meeting of the Ecofund after they got the money to make sure that
everything was in order. The reason they
wanted me in Rome so quickly was that Italy was about the assume the rotating
presidency of the European Union, with meant an increase in work for the
embassy in Rome, because it had to deal with Italians on all EU matters as well
as on all bilateral Italian matters, more or less doubling the workload. It worked out that the annual meeting of the
Ecofund was a week or two before Italy assumed the EU presidency, which gave me
the opportunity to do both things.
The Ecofund meeting
went smoothly, but it turned out that day I was planning to leave for Rome was
the day Newt Gingrich shut the government down.
All of our household effects had been packed; the car was packed with
two dogs and suitcases for the drive to Rome ready to leave at 5:00, when Rome
called and said, "Don't come."
It meant I had no job, no place to live, no idea what to do next. It turned out that in Rome the Deputy Chief
of Mission (DCM, deputy to the Ambassador) was someone I knew from a previous
assignment. He said to go ahead an leave
for Rome; he would work something out.
When we arrived in
Rome, everything was pretty much a mess, because the embassy was closed except
for a skeleton staff. I turned out that
I was part of that skeleton staff, because that was the only way my travel had
been approved. Of course I knew nothing
about the embassy or my new job. To make
matters worse, the Administrative Minister, the person responsible for running
the day-to-day activities of the embassy, was a woman literally dying of
cancer. As she was a long time Foreign
service officer, the State Department had agreed to let her stay in Rome as
long as she could. This meant, however,
that she was hardly working and was very seldom in the embassy. During the government shutdown, all of her
assistants were working their little fiefdoms -- housing, personnel, finance,
etc. -- but without supervision.
The first sign,
other than the government shutdown, that something was wrong, was that the
embassy had no housing for my wife and me.
My predecessor had obviously lived somewhere, but the embassy would not
tell me anything about it. My impression
was that because he had been a political appointee and a confidant of the
Ambassador, he had had a much nicer apartment than he would have ordinarily
received for his position, and they were not willing to let me have it. There as a rumor that there was one empty
apartment the day we arrived, but that it had been given to a DEA agent who had
arrived a few hours earlier than we did.
I thought this was strange because the State Department runs the
administration of the embassy, even for other agencies like DEA. Thus, I thought normally State Department officers
would have assigned the empty apartment to a fellow FSO and let the DEA wait
for an apartment. I was surprised to see
the State Department give precedence to a DEA officer over a fellow State
Department officer. We ended up in a
temporary apartment for months as the embassy said it could find nothing
available for us on the Roman rental market.
In addition, after
my predecessor left, the office had been remodeled. The embassy is an old palace where every room
opens on to a central hall, but because of embassy security, some of the doors
had to be locked. As a result, there was
no way to get to my assistant's office except by going through my office. I suppose I could have switched offices with
her, but it seemed silly and petty to do so.
Nevertheless, it bothered me that it looked like I was her receptionist
when she had visitors.
Just about the day I
arrived, my office was being sued in New York by four environmental
organizations for failing to force Italy to comply with UN resolutions
regarding fishing for swordfish in the Mediterranean. The Italians often used long driftnets which
had been outlawed. The environmental
organizations won the case, with the result that a Federal District Judge in
New York had ultimate responsibility for approving any actions taken by my
office with regard to fisheries to assure that they complied with UN
regulations. In theory he would run
every action by my office by the environmental organizations for their
approval. In practice this usually meant
they would ask the Greenpeace office in Rome for its approval.
Despite the fact
that I had worked on scientific and environmental issues for years at the State
Department, I had never worked on fisheries issues before. Fisheries had its own bureaucracy, laws and
regulations which were unfamiliar to me.
My assistant had worked on fisheries issues in previous jobs, and had
been working on the issue since she had arrived in Rome. I was happy to leave the issue to her,
although it was a big part of the office's responsibilities.
We had a big
bilateral meeting in Rome with a delegation of 10 or 20 officers from
Washington meeting in Rome with their Italian counterparts. My assistant and her Italian counterpart
worked out a plan, which was ratified by the meeting. In a few months, however, the issue blew up
again. Most of the fishermen lived in
Sicily and resented the new restrictions under which they were supposed to
work. They hired Mafia assassins who
threatened to kill the Italian officials who were supposed to enforce the
agreement, and they organized big protests in downtown Rome that tied up
traffic for miles. When this blew up, my
assistant became very sick. The
Agriculture Minister called in the Ambassador because he was afraid some of his
officials were going to be killed by the Mafia, and said we had to relax the
restrictions. My assistant could not
brief the Ambassador or work on a solution, which fell to me. The Ambassador was very unhappy about being
called in by the Minister. My main job
was to tell the Ambassador that he could not agree to anything without first
getting the approval of the judge in New York, which further angered him, since
he felt that as the Ambassador he should have been able to speak for the US,
which would have been true except for the lawsuit. One of my last acts in Rome was to work out a
compromise that was accepted, although I don't know long it lasted after I
left. I left with the Ambassador mad at
me, although the fisheries problem had been going on for years before I arrived
in Rome, and I had had no role in the lawsuit.
However, I had agreed to the original solution worked out at the big
bilateral meeting after I arrived, which had led to the Mafia threats.
While I was in Rome,
the Italians flew a joint mission on the Space Shuttle to test a tethered
satellite which was released on a wire from the Shuttle while it was in orbit
and then was supposed to be reeled back in so that it could be used again. While the satellite was deployed, the wire
broke, and the satellite drifted off into space. I had worked with NASA on space issues in
other jobs before, and was much more familiar with these issues than
fisheries. In general NASA was a great
selling point for the US. Everybody
loved NASA and the Shuttle and wanted to work with us. Thus, this mission was unusual because it
appeared to have failed, although part of the reason for it was to experiment
with the method. The Shuttle crew came
to Rome to brief Italians scientists on the mission, but unlike most NASA
visits, this one was sort of an apology tour.
It was awkward for me, the Shuttle crew, and my Italian contacts.
In a different space
matter, the US had agreed to launch a communications satellite for the
Italians. They had a big cocktail party
timed to coincide with the launch. At
the party, one of the Italian telecommunications officials came up to me and
said something like, "Your government must really hate me." I was taken aback and asked him why he
thought that. He said that he had wanted
to give his daughter a trip to Disney World, but that the US had denied her a
visa to travel to the US. I said I would
look into it. When I did, I found that
the Italian communications ministry has some connection with the Cuban
telecommunications ministry and because of that the Helms-Burton Act prohibited
that official or any members of his family from traveling to the US.
Sometime in the
past, I had read Herman Wouk's "Winds of War" and "War and
Remembrance." In that story, the
Jewish heroine who was living in Rome during World War II wanted to travel to
Israel, but the Nazis in Rome would not give her child an exit visa, which
effectively prevented her from leaving. I found the parallels uncomfortable and
disturbing, but it was illegal to give the daughter a visa.
As the science
officer in Rome, I handled nuclear non-proliferation matters. Thus, I was the responsible officer when the
US was unable to meet its obligations to North Korea under the 1995 Agreed
Framework that set up the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization
(KEDO) to oversee North Korea's agreement to end its nuclear weapons program in
return for two light water nuclear power reactors that would not produce bomb
grade nuclear materials. While I was in
Rome, the Republican Congress refused to fund the US payments for its part of
the agreement. As a result, I had to go
hat in hand to ask Italy, as the Presidency of the European Union, if it would
fund the money the the US Congress refused to provide. This was too much like my experience in
Poland when the US Congress refused to fund the Maria Sklodowska Curie Fund
despite a formal agreement to do so. In
addition , the failure to fund KEDO would give North Korea an excuse not to
abide by the agreement and to revert to its production of nuclear weapons. I was unhappy to once again be part of an
American failure to meet its international commitments.
I had joined the
Foreign Service to see how the government worked. After college, I had been drafted and sent to
Vietnam, where I served in an artillery battery in the A Sau Valley, on the
Laotian border, and on the DMZ. I came
home to be classified as a baby-killing war criminal, simply because I had not
tried to get out of the draft. I wanted
to see what had plucked me out of my comfortable life and sent me into combat
in Vietnam. Once in the Foreign Service
I wanted to do good -- be part of the solution and not part of the
problem. My last two assignments, in
Warsaw and Rome, had not made me feel part of the solution. So, I decided to retire, since I was eligible
to do so.
When I decided to
retire and the embassy had to replace me, it became obvious that they did not
want me to be replaced by a Foreign Service officer. The embassy had identified
a Civil Service officer at the State Department whom it wanted in my job. Apparently, the embassy had tried to get him
to replace my predecessor, but the State Department had tried to keep the
Foreign Service position filled by a Foreign Service officer. That was why I had gotten that unexpected
call in Warsaw asking if I would be willing to go to Rome. The State Department was trying to force Rome
to fill the position with a Foreign Service officer. Apparently that was why Rome did not welcome
me and resisted providing me with an apartment and in general making my
assignment there difficult.
The odd thing was
that the person they wanted in my position worked in the State Department
office that was supposed to support and backstop science officers in the
field. In my Washington assignment
before Warsaw, I had worked on environmental issues in an office across the
hall from his office. It appeared that
the office that was supposed to have my back had actually stabbed me in the
back. Because I was retiring outside of
the normal summer assignment cycle the embassy was able to manipulate the
system to get the man they wanted. I was
so disgusted with the whole system that I did not protest. On the day before I was actually set to leave
Rome and return home, the State Department retirement office informed me that
they had miscalculated my retirement pension and that I would receive less than
they had promised when I was negotiating my retirement. That was like a last insult from an
organization that for some reason seemed to have turned against me.
Unfortunately, my
service in the Army in Vietnam and my twenty-five years in the Foreign Service
left a bad taste in my mouth about the integrity and decency of the United
States government. I felt that I had
served my country patriotically but had been abused because of it. I guess I think (to paraphrase Churchill)
that the US is the worst of countries, except for all other countries. I try to love it, but I look at it with a
jaundiced eye.
