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  The next morning, Gersony met with Davis and Bennett and told them what had happened. Davis was alarmed, yet satisfied at the same time. “Bob, work with John to write a cable to the assistant secretary [of African affairs at the State Department],” Davis said. Bennett wrote the lead summary and streamlined phrases, but did not change a word of substance regarding what Gersony had written.

  “Bob was a natural,” Bennett remembers, “who could work the field and then put it all down for people in Washington. And he could type faster than any person I have ever encountered save Mrs. Kleka who taught me typing at the U.S. Army Intelligence School in the 1960s.” Indeed, Gersony could move the keys so fast that he frequently beat the IBM golf ball. Davis signed off on Gersony’s cable (which the CIA station chief had helped corroborate with his own sources). Like all State Department cables, it was officially sent to the secretary of state, but with “tags” indicating that it was really meant for African affairs, USAID, and the refugee and human rights bureaus, where the various assistant secretaries of state and deputy assistant secretaries of state would see it. State Department cables have four categories of importance: “routine,” “priority,” “immediate,” and “flash,” in order of ascending urgency. Flash meant a war or some such thing had broken out and those cables were rare. This cable was marked “immediate.”

  But days and more days went by and there was no response. Gersony was surprised. He had much to learn about how Washington and the State Department operated.

  Meanwhile, Davis called one of his periodic meetings of the diplomatic and donor community, where he once again raised the issue regarding the mysterious fate of the three thousand people at Nakasongola, and the suspected atrocities in the Luwero Triangle. Neither he, nor Bennett, nor Gersony dared mention Gersony’s trip and what he had seen, for fear of getting Bill Kirkham in trouble. In fact, Bill Kirkham’s motives for taking Gersony with him on the trip became ever more of a mystery to them. The British high commissioner, Colin McLean, the Elliott Gould look-alike whom Gersony had mistakenly called by his first name at the garden party upon first arriving in Kampala, was in high dudgeon at the meeting, vigorously pointing out that there was no independent corroboration of anything amiss happening in the Luwero region. So the meeting ended inconclusively, with the Americans stuck because they were afraid to reveal everything that they knew. Many people in the diplomatic community were by now fed up with the British High Commission. McLean himself had been a district officer in Kenya during the colonial era, and in Uganda he was merely defending an African state that had once been Britain’s own possession. So the natives are restless, we’ve seen it all before appeared to be his attitude.11 “McLean was a nose-in-the-air type,” Pierre Gassmann recalls. “He was always saying, ‘In Uganda there is no alternative to Mr. Obote.’ ”

  It was hard to act without Great Britain’s approval in a place that had been part of the empire, of which there was still a mystique in 1984. There was an indefinable sense of deference still.

  Now Gersony had to fly back to Washington for a scheduled consultation with Gene Dewey at the State Department’s refugee bureau, at the halfway point in his six-month assignment.

  Walking into Dewey’s office, he explained that while the victims in the Luwero Triangle were displaced persons within Uganda—and not refugees from across an international border, which he had intended to focus on—he just felt he had to write the cable. Dewey had in fact liked the cable, told him to concentrate on the Luwero Triangle, and added that Gersony had his “complete executive support.” Dewey told him to first brief State’s Africa bureau.

  The office director for East Africa, Richard Bogosian, was a Foreign Service lifer: heavyset, buttoned down, with tortoiseshell glasses. He seemed to like Gersony, but was worried about him: “Your cable gave me nightmares. But I need more information.” He advised Gersony to write several more cables, about who the “bad guys” were, their biographies, who exactly was ordering the killing, and so on. Gersony was perplexed, still new to the State Department, and thus unsure whether Bogosian was simply being thorough or was stringing him along. Gersony was thinking constantly about the fact that the ICRC and the entire NGO and diplomatic communities were being for the most part excluded from even setting foot inside the Luwero Triangle.

  Gersony next saw Ambassador James Bishop, a rail of a man with a goatee, who was a deputy assistant secretary of state for African affairs. It so happened that Uganda’s Anglican archbishop, Yona Okoth, a northerner and friend of Obote, was coming to Washington and was scheduled to meet with Vice President George H. W. Bush. “Let’s make a talking point for the vice president to raise in the meeting,” Bishop offered. “The vice president will say, if the human rights violations in the Luwero Triangle do not stop, the United States reserved the right to do something.” The meeting between Bush and Archbishop Okoth occurred on June 27, 1984. Bush told the archbishop that the “human rights situation in your country (army massacres, government failure to cooperate well in refugee relief/food distribution) is of great concern, as we’ve told your government.”12 Still, nothing happened. Nevertheless, Bishop would henceforth follow Gersony’s career path through one African crisis after another. He recollects, “Gersony always did his homework in the most laborious manner, often taking his sponsors outside their comfort zone with unwelcome information.”

  Before flying back to Kampala, Roger Winter, an eminence grise in the Washington human rights field and an evangelical Christian who went to the same church as Gene Dewey, arranged for Gersony to brief the entire Washington NGO community. But still, nothing was generated. This was long before the days of blogs and social media when such a briefing could go viral. If the major newspapers and magazines were not aware of the story, it remained hidden.

  Back in Kampala, Gersony went to work on the cables for Bogosian. The U.S. Embassy had no detailed biographies of the “bad guys” in Obote’s circle. So Gersony went to Peter Penfold, the deputy British high commissioner. It turned out that the British had exhaustive biographies that they shared with Gersony. Gersony’s cable, containing all manner of personal and salacious details of Obote’s inner circle, had a blockbuster effect within the refugee and Africa bureaus, though it was essentially lifted from what the British already had for a long time in their files.

  Also, soon after returning from Washington, at one of their Sunday lunches of hamburgers and French fries at the American Club in Kampala, Gersony asked Pierre Gassmann, the ICRC representative, how many people he thought had been killed in the Luwero Triangle. Gassmann ordered a survey of health experts, demographers, and epidemiologists in Kampala and Geneva to extrapolate the population loss. He came up with a figure of 88,000 missing persons.

  Gersony mused, only half-serious, “You need 100,000 to make it into the PDB,” the President’s Daily Briefing prepared for President Reagan each morning by the CIA. Gassmann said he would look again into the matter and came up with “100,000 as an order of magnitude.” Gersony dutifully reported this to Washington.13

  Weeks went by uneventfully. One evening, after another late night at the U.S. Embassy, Gersony drove back in his sedan to the house where he was staying. As he left the parking lot, which was adjacent to that of the British High Commission, another car flashed on its headlights, gunned its engines, and began following close behind him. He could make out two African men in the other car. They followed him into the business district. Gersony felt nervous. He knew he possessed “guilty knowledge.” He entered a roundabout and circled the full 360 degrees twice. The other car followed him around both times. It was a hot night with no breeze and he was sweating profusely. Lots of people were at a popular outdoor café drinking beer. He thought of parking by the café but lost his composure. He had a clunky transmitter in his car, thanks to the advice of John Bennett. He radioed him what was happening. “Drive to my house immediately!” Bennett screamed back through the static. Gersony d
rove to Bennett’s house, shaking. The car behind him dropped off. Was he merely being paranoid, or was it a deliberate attempt to scare him, or monitor him?

  Soon the time came for Gersony’s last meeting of the diplomatic community, before his assignment in Kampala was completed. Ambassador Davis asked him to sum up for the group “where we stand on Luwero.” Gersony mentioned the “order of magnitude of 100,000 missing people” that he had cabled to Washington, and said: “Government troops are going around on search and destroy missions killing all the people they can find.”

  British High Commissioner McLean repeated that there was no independent corroboration. Deputy High Commissioner Penfold was more nuanced, but still backed up his boss. Again the Americans remained silent, still afraid of compromising Bill Kirkham. As Gene Dewey would later tell me, the British were, in fact, aware of the “grave violations of international humanitarian law,” but “desisted” in ever joining the United States in exposing or condemning the Obote regime, which the Foreign Office had to protect. Again, this was a time, less than a quarter century after the British Empire had ended in Uganda, when Great Britain still mattered in Africa. There remained a certain aura about it, especially in the Thatcher years. Moreover, because Uganda was landlocked, it was not particularly strategic and thus Western allies like the British and Americans could afford to disagree about it.

  The Italian ambassador spoke next, mentioning the telecommunications project his government was negotiating with Obote. The European Commission representative said he had no instructions from Brussels to act. Papal pro-nuncio Rauber, sitting as usual in the humble, hard-back chair rather than on one of the couches, said, “These are our brothers being killed in the Luwero Triangle. We must do something.” The German ambassador congratulated Ambassador Davis for his persistence and said, “With our history, we cannot afford to close our eyes.” Ambassador Davis, on behalf of everybody, then thanked Gersony for his work. British High Commissioner McLean with great politeness thanked Gersony, too.

  “Davis and Bennett never flinched. They never took a word out of my cables,” Gersony says.

  Fourteen years later, upon his retirement, interviewed for his oral history, Ambassador Allen Davis said this for the official record:

  “Obote very often saw the world through a drunken haze, he would absolutely become vehement and say [to me], ‘There is nothing bad going on. There are people trying to bring down our government and who do not wish this country well. What you are saying is false.’ But there was a young man sent in by the Department of State named Bob. He was a specialist on refugees and displaced people. He was the instrument by which we finally got what we thought were hard facts. And they were almost too difficult for us to accept—the numbers of people dying and wandering around. It was absolutely scandalous.”14

  Nevertheless, Gersony left Kampala as thousands and thousands of people were being killed, and nothing was being done.

  * * *

  —

  On Gersony’s way back to Washington, Gene Dewey had sent him to Geneva, Switzerland, to visit with the U.S. refugee programs office there.

  Nothing would come of his meetings in Geneva, though, which included an expensive dinner in a private dining room of the Perle du Lac on the shores of Lake Leman with U.N. officials. It was the kind of social event Gersony hated.

  Gersony was perplexed. He was both intimidated by these international bureaucrats and upset with them at the same time. They had all the credentials and social graces that he didn’t have, and worked in a glittering environment that he could only envy. But what exactly did they do? It was sort of a mystery to him.

  * * *

  —

  Gersony left Geneva and the alluring world of the international human rights elite with absolutely nothing accomplished.

  He spent several days in his one-bedroom apartment off Central Park West in Manhattan, decorated with his Guatemalan cloths and bric-a-brac, rent controlled at the time, banging out a final cable that summarized all he knew about Uganda and the Luwero Triangle on a red IBM Selectric typewriter (with automatic white-out), highlighting the punch lines in pink. His girlfriend Ann Siegel was with him. “To watch him type for hours on end at such high speed was something incredible. It is an image I will never forget, as if he were physically acting out his frustrations,” Ann says.

  Gersony actually did not talk much about Uganda to Ann while in New York. Most of what she knew about Uganda she had learned from his letters in the field, which he would write in the lonely nights after long days at the embassy in Kampala, explaining to her in typed print about the Banyankole, the Banyarwanda, the Luwero Triangle, and so on, letters that could take weeks to arrive, with hers crossing his in the mail. “It was the 1980s, but before email it was like the nineteenth century,” she says.

  Gersony returned to Washington.

  Dewey told him to brief everybody in the State Department he could find. This would turn out to be a key moment in a process in which the refugee bureau was elbowing its way into actual policy operations, which were normally reserved for the geographic, “line” bureaus like African affairs, Asian affairs, and so on. Gersony delivered about a dozen briefings: he got a lot of love and sympathy, but no action. What really frustrated him was that a representative from the human rights bureau never seemed to be present.

  He was at another turning point. Only by disclosure to the media could he see a way to move the issue of systematic mass murder and torture at Bombo Barracks and the rest of the Luwero Triangle. Yet he was afraid of losing his job and his security clearance. He was a contractor who had been working laboriously over a decade to build a reputation and credibility. And if he leaked, Davis and Bennett would take all of the heat. All the credibility and trust he had built up with them would be lost. What he didn’t know at the time was that Bennett never minded “soft leaks,” so long as “they were accurate.”

  Gersony had a friend, Frank Method, ten years older than himself, from Wisconsin: a giant of a guy, with a black beard and decidedly left-wing views. He was a fervent Catholic, and had worked his way up from humble beginnings to be an education adviser for the Ford Foundation. Method was a rough, tough cream puff of a man. “I don’t know what to do,” Gersony told him.

  “I’m going to help you,” Method responded.

  Method’s friend and neighbor in the Washington, D.C., area of Mount Pleasant was Patrick Tyler, a Washington Post reporter who would later rise to become the chief correspondent of The New York Times. Method talked to Tyler, who told him that Gersony should expect a call from his Washington Post colleague Caryle Murphy.

  Gersony was staying at the Howard Johnson Motor Lodge on Virginia Avenue across from the Watergate complex, where some of the famous burglars had kept watch, and which offered him cheap rates. (It is now a George Washington University dormitory.) One afternoon he sat in a restaurant booth there for two hours talking with Caryle Murphy. It was a typical situation. The reporter was enthusiastic for the information, the informant was terrified and measuring each word he uttered, unsure if he was throwing his life away every extra minute he spent with the reporter. Murphy, several decades later, doesn’t remember many of the details of the meeting, except Gersony’s “passion for the issue, and his kindness.”

  For that night and the one following, Gersony’s bedsheets were soaked with sweat. He was shaking and his thoughts raced with anxiety. He rose from his bed in the Howard Johnson on August 3, 1984, with bags under his eyes, on the morning of his very last State Department briefing.

  “Is there anyone here from the human rights bureau?” he asked before beginning his brief. He was angry that no one from the bureau had ever come. No one sitting at the main table in the room answered his question. Then a somewhat short, intense guy with a fierce expression and black hair in one of the chairs crammed against the wall raised his hand. “I’m Elliott Abrams, assistant secretary
of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs. You have my bureau’s attention.”

  So Gersony unloaded about West Nile, Mbarara, Karamoja, and finally the Luwero Triangle, aided by the maps that he always brought along with him: it was a briefing that Gersony had given innumerable times by now, and thus he delivered it without notes, having leeched out of it any emotion or trigger words. It was that much more powerful to merely describe the small concentration camp he and Bill Kirkham had come upon rather than to condemn it. Let the policymakers condemn it. He was like a reporter who merely described what he saw, since, to quote Graham Greene, “even an opinion is a kind of action.”15

  After he finished there was silence. Then Mark Edelman, the acting deputy administrator of USAID, a Reagan political appointee, said: “I don’t see how we can have an assistance program in a country slaughtering its own people. Close the mission”—even though Obote was officially an ally.

  A former embassy staffer in Uganda said: “Don’t cut aid off to the whole country. Just cut it off in the Luwero Triangle.”

  An embarrassed silence. The whole point was that the NGO community was to a great extent already barred from the Luwero Triangle.

  Edelman replied: “The issue is, we can’t support a regime that murders its own people like this.”

  Then Elliott Abrams spoke: “Of course, Mark is right. Otherwise our human rights policy is meaningless.”

  When the meeting ended, Abrams went up to Gersony to compliment him on his briefing. Abrams vividly recalls the moment decades later:

  “It was the first time I ever heard or saw Bob Gersony. I remember thinking: this is new. This is not an AID brief. It is not an embassy brief. This is different. It’s firsthand. It is rare, shocking. You know, you’re an assistant secretary of state. You get daily reports from the embassies, from AID, from the CIA, from the National Security Council staff. But none of them can often tell you what is really going on in a country, at ground level, to ordinary people. No one can explain what the hell is happening, what does it mean. That was the amazing thing about this briefing, and about all of Gersony’s work for many years to come. He could always tell you what none of the agencies could. Bob would go on in his career to gain an extraordinary amount of access to high officials, even though he was always a mere contractor—for an offline bureau no less! Because what he had to tell people really was new.”