The Good American Read online

  Shortly after Abrams returned to his office, the phone rang on his desk. It was the Washington Post reporter Caryle Murphy, who asked him to comment on disturbing reports about the Luwero Triangle. Abrams opened up to her on the record with what he had learned from Gersony’s brief.

  That Sunday morning, August 5, 1984, back in Manhattan, Gersony got a call from a friend in Washington, who told him frantically to buy the big weekend edition of The Washington Post. There was a hole-in-the-wall newstand on Columbus Avenue, which later became part of a pizza joint. Gersony saw that it carried two copies of the Sunday Washington Post. Gersony bought one of them and in the middle of the street began reading. Murphy’s piece was on the front page, under the fold. The headline read “New Ugandan Crackdown Said to Kill Thousands.”

  The article began:

  The Ugandan Army has killed or intentionally starved to death thousands of civilians in the past few months as part of what appears to be an officially sanctioned get-tough policy…

  The deaths, mostly of women and children…are part of a campaign in the African country that Ugandans and foreign observers say is worse than the atrocity-ridden eight-year rule of president Idi Amin.

  Elliott Abrams, assistant secretary of state…called the situation ‘horrendous’…He said in a telephone interview Friday that he plans to talk about it in detail at a congressional hearing this week.

  Murphy went on to write that “between 100,000 and 200,000 Ugandans have been killed in the past three years in one area of the country known as the Luwero Triangle.” She quoted Roger Winter, director of the U.S. Committee for Refugees, whom Gersony had briefed at length, as saying that while Milton Obote lacked “the buffoonery and notoriety” of Idi Amin, “ ‘the number of people affected by these crazy, irrational killings are [sic] larger.’ ”16

  Gersony read the article, still standing in the street, both exhilarated and terrified, though he became calmer as he finished reading, because his own name had not been mentioned. Abrams had taken the issue on as his own and accepted full public responsibility. In the apartment he showed it to Ann, who caught his excitement. But then his anxious mind again began racing. “I may have to pursue a new line of work if they trace it all back to my interview with Caryle Murphy….” Once more, he didn’t sleep that night.

  Back at the State Department that Monday morning, though the Africa bureau was quite upset, Dewey was pleased and Abrams had no problem with the article. “Gersony, you mousetrapped me,” Abrams said good-naturedly. Abrams believed that Gersony had arranged for the Washington Post reporter to call him after the briefing, even though Gersony hadn’t even known Abrams’s name until Abrams had announced himself there.

  Days later NGOs like the ICRC and Save the Children were allowed greater access to the Luwero Triangle, and the killing slowed dramatically. Other media reports began to appear. Abrams gave an interview to the BBC, which, because of its Africa Service, broadcast all over the continent and naturally had a greater impact in Kampala than the Washington Post article. “I played this bizarre, outsized role on the issue largely thanks to Bob,” Abrams recalls. A New York Times editorial said, “Five years after its liberation from the butchery of Idi Amin, Uganda is again a killing ground. In recent months more than 100,000 people have been massacred or starved, according to reports the State Department finds credible.”17 In another New York Times piece, correspondent Clifford May quoted a Ugandan opposition leader as saying that, whereas Amin “would pick and choose his targets,” Obote killed “at random.”18

  The Africa bureau was somewhat upset with the human rights bureau because of the damage that the disclosures about the Luwero Triangle had on American-Ugandan bilateral relations. Secretary of State George Shultz called Abrams and Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Chester Crocker into his office in mid-August. To some extent, it was a typical case of national interests versus humanitarian values. But the Africa bureau’s viewpoint was less cynical than it may appear: after the horrors of the Amin years, the bureau had been trying to strengthen Obote as a vehicle for normalization. And since Obote’s crimes had only recently been exposed, the bureau had insufficient time to fully rethink its approach. After hearing Crocker out, Shultz turned to Abrams, who merely said that nobody was disputing the facts of the case, as more and more corroboration for Gersony’s reporting had been coming in.19 Shultz reportedly said he was going to side with Abrams on this issue. “It’s the kind of people we Americans are.”

  Crocker was annoyed with his own staff for being behind the curve on the whole Luwero Triangle human rights issue. A line bureau assistant secretary like himself depends on his information from his deputy assistant secretaries and his geographic region directors. Crocker now reflects: “I said to them, ‘Why am I reading about this ex post facto in The Washington Post? Do I have to ask you for news when it is bad? Or can you volunteer it?’ I was unhappy about not being ahead of the story.”

  In early September, Crocker made a visit to Uganda to repair relations and to talk about wider African issues. He and Obote walked hand in hand, African style, through the presidential gardens in Kampala. Obote had Scotch whiskey on his breath, Crocker remembers. Crocker never backed off the State Department’s now-official assessment of what had happened in the Luwero Triangle, which was mainly based on Gersony’s cables. But the avalanche of exposés that had started with Caryle Murphy’s Washington Post article had wounded Obote politically around the world, and helped provide the momentum for the coup d’état that ousted him in July 1985. The ethnic-Acholi general Tito Okello ruled for six months until he, in turn, was replaced by Yoweri Museveni and his National Resistance Army.

  In the end, it was Obote’s utter reliance on tribalism that undid him. Lacking any program or ideology, he ruled through a tense alliance of Iteso, Acholis, and his own Langis within the army. Okello’s coup, meanwhile, had brought Ugandan tribalism to its logical extreme, with one tribe, the Acholis, now attempting to dominate the other thirty-nine. Anarchy prevailed in the capital as large numbers of non-Acholi troops deserted to Museveni’s NRA.

  Museveni’s capture of Kampala on January 25, 1986, was the culmination of a protracted and disciplined military campaign that in terms of strategy came closer to the Maoist blueprint than any previous African guerrilla struggle. Analysts in Kampala told me when I was there a few months after Museveni’s takeover that the NRA could have occupied the capital earlier, but Museveni kept postponing the invasion until support for him was so overwhelming that his rule became inevitable. This time there was no looting or misconduct in the capital, or even in the conquered Acholi areas of the north. Museveni would still be in power a third of a century later, ruling at first as an enlightened autocrat and later on as a less enlightened one. Tribalism in Uganda could not be denied, but neither did it have to constitute a fate.

  The United States had a new ambassador in Kampala by the time Museveni came to power, Robert Houdek, who had become a fan of Gersony’s cables while at the embassy in Nairobi. Houdek arrived in Kampala soon after Allen Davis had finished his tour, and when the Ugandan capital was in chaos, with Okello’s troops deserting and Museveni’s about to move into the city. John Bennett was still there as DCM, though, and was able to use his police “lunch-box-size” radio and scanner to pinpoint the movement of Museveni’s advancing army.

  As soon as Museveni arrived in Kampala, he summoned Houdek, British High Commissioner McLean, and a few other diplomats to meet with him while his NRA was restoring calm to the city. The meeting took place under a tree outside the Lukiko, the old Buganda parliament building. One of Museveni’s kadogas—orphans of war who made up a part of his army—brought Fanta and other soft drinks on a tray. Houdek vividly remembers that when the boy opened one of the bottles, the contents sprayed all over him. They all laughed, and then Museveni addressed Houdek in a deep voice: “I want to thank your president, and especially your Mr. Elli
ott [Abrams], for putting the spotlight on what was happening in the Luwero Triangle.”

  Museveni next turned to the British high commissioner, saying: “And you, sir, were never even in the game.”

  A few days later, McLean was asked to leave Uganda.

  Museveni took Houdek to Luwero. They saw a small compound surrounded by elephant grass, where vehicles had not been for a few months. In one room, on the wall, someone had written in blood with his fingertip: “God Save Me.” Out back were an assemblage of skeletons still with some skin on them, like dried leather. The hands were tied together with wire and the skulls had been crushed by tire irons, which were still lying nearby.

  * * *

  —

  Museveni would become a platform for America to project power in the region, signaling the final eclipse of British influence in East Africa. “And we had been in such awe of the High Commission,” Gersony recalls. As in Dominica, which saw the rise of Eugenia Charles, partly because of Gersony’s actions, Uganda also proved that an aggressive human rights policy could be a complement, rather than an impediment, to U.S. strategic goals. (Of course, Museveni over the decades would prove to be no angel. Just witness his nurturing of the career of Paul Kagame, the Rwandan president—a man with Hutu blood on his hands, in spite of being an efficient technocrat.20 Nevertheless, we can still say that Museveni has proven to be a vast improvement over Amin and Obote.)

  Dewey says Gersony’s work in Uganda was a “tour de force” that “spoke truth to power, whatever the consequences.” It was “Bob’s first big play.” There would be others, much bigger ones, years down the road, also in Africa.

  * * *

  —

  But what about Bill Kirkham?

  His exact motives will forever remain a mystery. One may speculate that he had gotten tired of Obote’s alcoholic benders and the descent of the national army into a rampaging mob. So he had gone to the British High Commission with his complaints but had gotten little sympathy. Then he heard through his friend Pierre Gassmann about this younger guy at the American embassy who was on top of these matters, and thus decided to take Gersony inside the Luwero Triangle with him.

  William Ernest Evans Kirkham was later awarded the CBE and MBE, Commander of the Order of the British Empire and Member of the Order of the British Empire. He retired to Cape Town, South Africa, where he would die peacefully at ninety-one, surrounded by children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

  * * *

  —

  What did Gersony learn during this first Uganda episode of his life?

  He learned that the business of the State Department is writing cables. Indeed, State was organized around the need to report from foreign countries. In this way, the Foreign Service worked in parallel with the great print-and-typewriter-age newspapers of the day. To be “productive” in the Foreign Service was a term of art: it meant specifically to be a good and prolific cable writer. And John Bennett had taught Gersony all he needed to know about this.

  But Gersony also learned that the bureaucracy rarely moves on the basis of one cable, no matter how dramatic. George Kennan’s “long telegram” written from Moscow in 1946 remains an exception that proves the rule. You had to mount a bureaucratic campaign to sell your cable, and sell it, and sell it again until a spark caught fire. That, in turn, meant finding allies and neutralizing opponents: Don’t excite your bureaucratic enemies, leave them be and try to work around them. Only if there is no other choice should you confront them. And the best weapon for such a confrontation is an unassailable methodology.

  Gersony knew now that he needed a better, more scientific way of collecting information, and of translating his experiences into reports that others would not—and could not—doubt or question. Here is where his accountant-slash-bookkeeper-slash-commodity-trader mind would lead him toward an interview and reporting process that, more than anything he had done up until this point, would come to define his life, and alter his personality even.

  The learning curve would be gradual. It would begin in his next assignment in Thailand, ripen in Sudan and Chad, and reach maturity and culmination in Mozambique, henceforth becoming his signature specialty throughout the rest of his career. But it was Uganda that had given him the germ of an idea.

  CHAPTER 5

  South China Sea

  1984–1985

  “Write It All Up. I Want Cables!”

  Gersony finished the Uganda business insecure because he had become attached to controversy inside the Africa bureau, and thus wasn’t sure if he would be allowed to work on the continent again. With the embers of Uganda still hot, Gene Dewey called him into his office and said, “I’m sending you to Bangkok.”

  Dewey wanted a blueprint about how to stop the piracy against Vietnamese boat people in the greater South China Sea, particularly in the Gulf of Thailand. UNHCR and the rest of the aid community were working the problem, but not coming up with answers. People were still desperately fleeing from Vietnam by boat, a decade after the communist takeover of the South and the consequent reunification of the country. The refugees used little fishing schooners designed only to hug the coast, but were desperately sailing them onto the high seas toward international shipping lanes, with all of their life savings with them. Pirates, often Thai fishermen, were robbing the refugees of their small amounts of gold, jewelry, and cash, and abducting the young women to gang-rape and subsequently throw overboard. Then, they rammed the rickety schooners to pieces and the occupants mostly drowned. Sometimes the boats broke up by themselves, and most of the occupants would be lost, unless they could grab on to a log and drift in some incredible way to safety. According to UNHCR, as many as 400,000 would die at sea before the crisis was alleviated.

  Thailand, overwhelmed for years with refugees from both Vietnam and Khmer Rouge–controlled Kampuchea (Cambodia), was trying to discourage the boat people from coming there in the first place. In a policy of “humane deterrence,” the Thai authorities insisted on detaining the seaborne refugees for a year in crowded camps to discourage more of them from coming. The international relief community in Geneva was abuzz with meetings that yielded nothing. Stephen Solarz, a Democratic congressman from New York, got the United States to appropriate $5 million to buy the Thai navy one coast guard cutter a year to find pirates. By the time Gersony met with Dewey, there were two Thai cutters operating in the South China Sea. The greater South China Sea, including the Gulf of Thailand, is 1.35 million square miles, fourteen times the size of all of the Great Lakes combined. “What are two cutters going to do? Are we out of our minds?” Gersony thought.

  * * *

  —

  Bangkok. Inert traffic under a thick and soupy gray sky. Motorcyclists and rickshaw drivers zipping between gridlocked traffic lanes. The city was a sprawling construction site with tinted-glass skyscrapers going up everywhere. Massive crowds swarming beside lines of street vendors; makeshift sidewalk eateries with their pungent odors beside antiseptic luxury establishments. The city was overpowering yet efficient, noisy but exceedingly polite. The Thais have a high social IQ, Gersony quickly figured out. They know how to please, whether they mean it or not. Everything is etiquette and custom. All the spicy smells were different from those of either Africa or Latin America. Gersony registered these sensations but wasn’t particularly interested. His instinct was always the same: the truth and the answers were to be found in the field, beyond the capital city. So the quicker he could get out of Bangkok the better.

  “I didn’t go on any tours. I wasn’t interested in temples or canals. I avoided dinners with people. I never see anything anywhere. I’m a workaholic.” Whereas the State Department paid for five workdays a week, he worked seven and by now was negotiating for such. “He was one contractor who cost us a lot of money and this infuriated the green-eyeshade types in the office,” Dewey remembers.

  Gersony was a workaholic only beca
use he was insecure. “I was nervous. Up until I was eighteen, my background in failure was quite extensive. I had no idea how to deal with the piracy problem. I could see no way out of it. Yet I was there not to report, but to solve. Solarz and the NGOs were all on Dewey’s back. Who was I to come up with the answer?”

  Of course, Dewey was already thinking of Gersony as an outside-the-box thinker, so he began to give him impossible assignments.

  But before Gersony could get out of the capital and visit the refugee camps, he had to arrange permits and logistics for himself. So he was stuck in Bangkok for two weeks in the late summer of 1984. The first person he met was the refugee coordinator at the U.S. Embassy, Bill Stubbs. Stubbs, tall with a bushy brown mustache, was deceptively easygoing, appearing to give you all the time in the world, even as he had half a dozen people in his waiting room. After all, he had Cambodian refugees, Laotian refugees, and Vietnamese refugees, including boat people, all wallowing in massive internment camps in Thailand. Thailand at this moment in history, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the Khmer Rouge rampage in Cambodia, and the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, was hosting one of the world’s largest refugee populations.