The Good American Read online

  “We’ll explain later,” they said, giving Gersony distant stares. Gersony was offended. He may not have been part of the Foreign Service brotherhood, but he did have top secret clearance. He could be trusted. But he did not complain. He could only propose a plan, but whether it was accepted in full as policy was another matter. He had had his fair hearing.

  Dewey told Gersony to go ahead on part 2 of his plan: the dockside intelligence operation. Gersony was nervous. He had sold Tex Lierly to everyone without so much as talking to him, or knowing where he was presently based. He located the DEA agent in Arizona near the Mexican border. Tex was pleasant enough and enthusiastic over the phone, but there was a problem. He was a GS-13, General Service-13, in the government bureaucracy rankings. If he took Gersony’s assignment in Thailand, as prestigious as working for the State Department overseas would be, and as personally rewarding as it would be for him, he would be giving up his chance to be promoted to a GS-14. The difference in salary and benefits between the two rankings was very significant. Not to be promoted would undermine some of Tex’s retirement plans.

  Gersony discussed the problem with a friend at the refugee bureau, Alan Van Egmond, who said he could arrange a meeting between Gersony and DEA administrator Jack Lawn. The three of them met for lunch in Lawn’s private dining room at the DEA. To Gersony such Washington connections were all miraculous. He never got used to it, or rather never took them for granted. Lawn, who was new in his job, heard Gersony out and said matter-of-factly that he would fix it. A few days later Tex Lierly was promoted to GS-14 and soon afterward stopped off in Washington before heading with his family to Thailand.

  Tex came as advertised. He wore cowboy boots, had an easygoing manner, and was muscular in the way of a cop or a marine. “Made for the movies,” Gersony thought. In his early forties, Tex Lierly was born in Morillton, Arkansas, but went to school at Texas A&M. Before going off to Peace Corps training in Hawaii, he bought himself a cowboy hat with boots to match. When his new Peace Corps friends met him all decked out, they christened him with the nickname. Tex was equally impressed with Gersony. “I could relate my Peace Corps experience and love of Thailand to him. He totally got it. Gersony was just full of so much enthusiasm. He was unique among government officials I met.”

  The impact of Gersony’s plan was that no more coast guard cutters would be bought and family reunifications would happen immediately. The two-for-one visa option never did make it through the State Department bureaucracy. But Tex’s land-oriented intelligence operation, which he and Pancho Huddle worked out the details of, together with the Thai Marine Police, manifested dramatic results.

  “What we did was low cost and down to earth,” Tex recalls. “All our sources turned out to be land-based,” just as Gersony suspected. Tex and Pancho Huddle marketed it as a Thai program, which further encouraged the Marine Police. “Tex worked patiently with the Thai Marines,” Pancho remembers. “He had good people skills and was an exemplary guy.”

  They began by identifying the fleets of five to ten boats each of which regularly fished the territories where most of the attacks took place. They paid informants who were present at the docks and in the bars. At first they went after anyone they were suspicious of, but soon they were able to narrow the search down to the kingpins, usually the boat captains. The most effective sources were crew members of the pirate ships themselves, who were willing to accept payments for providing eyewitness information. This planted seeds of doubt in the minds of the ship captains, fearful that any member of their crews would rat on them if they attacked Vietnamese refugee schooners. With that the whole psychological climate changed.

  For good measure, Tex, Pancho, and the Thai authorities ran a psy-ops, or psychological operations program. They developed a puppet show that made the rounds of the southern Thai villages where the fishermen generally came from. The show had the following themes: the basic immorality of piracy, and the facts that it was against the Buddhist religion and that piracy reflected badly on the Thais and Thailand as a nation.

  By 1986 the number of those arrested reached fifty, as many as the four previous years put together. One convicted pirate received a death sentence by hanging, though it wasn’t carried out.2 By then the number of boats reporting attacks had dropped to 24 percent of the number of 1985, and in 1987 it had dropped to 7 percent. After a few years, the attacks virtually ceased.

  Tex Lierly spent two and a half years in Bangkok and Songkhla working with the Thai Marine Police. They would be some of the best years of his family’s life. His children learned to speak Thai and attended the international school in the capital. “Working on anti-piracy was like being back in the Peace Corps in the 1960s. I felt that I was doing good. I’m a romantic, I guess,” he says. He is now retired from the DEA and living in Alamosa, Colorado, the front range of the Rocky Mountains.

  CHAPTER 6

  Sudan and Chad

  1985

  “Goran…Goran…Goran”

  With the Luwero Triangle and South China Sea piracy under his belt, Bob Gersony was batting two for two with Gene Dewey at the State Department’s Bureau of Refugee Programs, not to mention his previous successes in Latin America. Yet he would now have to prove himself again, since Dewey had another assignment for him. As a self-employed contractor, Gersony was only as good as his last performance.

  Gersony would have to temporarily fill the slot of the refugee programs officer at the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum, Sudan. This was not a normal assignment like the one in Kampala, Uganda. In Khartoum, the previous refugee officer literally had to flee the country before finishing his tour. The circumstances are worth a long diversion from my narrative.

  * * *

  —

  Khartoum, Sudan. Dusty, sun-scorched, cratered, and disease-ridden at the confluence of the Blue and White Niles, a pattern of rectangles etched in sandpaper with a smell reminiscent of burning newsprint in the air: in the mid-1980s, this was an oversized village of people with dark complexions under flowing white robes. In the streets they moved like swans almost. Here Jerry Weaver, the U.S. Embassy’s refugee coordinator before Gersony came in, filled out the missing parts of his personality. “I’m really a misfit who found my niche in a wide-open desert space among the Arabs,” he told me some years afterward at his farm in Newark, Ohio, where I stayed with him for several days in 1992.1

  Weaver, born in 1939 into a working-class family, joined the Foreign Service when he was already forty and got posted to Khartoum. He was direct, rough-hewn, and lacking in the sophisticated graces on which the Foreign Service prides itself. Like Gersony, but for very different reasons, he was uncomfortable at diplomatic receptions. But put him in with a group of truck drivers, peasants, sleazy wheeler-dealers, or just about anyone other than upper-middle-class Westerners, and Jerry Weaver—a big, brawling former high school football player—showed unmatched social gifts. He never formally studied Arabic, but he picked it up, nevertheless. However imperfect his Arabic was, aided by his unaffected, outgoing personality, he could, to a significant extent, communicate. Weaver’s social web in Khartoum soon began to include Greek ivory traders, Pakistani oil merchants, and all forms of smugglers: of people, as well as of goods. Weaver would begin to talk about how to fix rifle barrels or how to reload magnum shot in a spent cartridge shell, or what kind of fertilizer to use, and the Arabs would just sit there and listen.

  Weaver had been at the Khartoum embassy for some time when a new ambassador arrived, Hume Horan, perhaps the greatest Arabic linguist in the State Department’s history, who had spent his professional life serving in one Arab country after another. He was another Chas Freeman, the kind of intellect that has largely gone extinct in the electronic age. Horan, who was born in 1934 and died in 2004, and whom I knew well, was so cerebral that his eyes flickered about and drank light, focusing on some blank sheet of inner space, the kind a physicist might look at. It is as though he we
re disembodied: “a distilled brain in a jar,” says Gersony about him. Hume Horan was also the polar opposite of Jerry Weaver. Whereas Weaver was a product of a forgotten, poor white working-class America, Horan, who looked like an airline pilot with a beautiful wife and children, was a product of boarding schools, Harvard, and the State Department’s Arabist elite.

  One day in the summer of 1984, a relief worker, a Swedish evangelical Christian, burst into Weaver’s office at the U.S. Embassy and began to cry. “They’re dying: it’s terrible; you’ve got to do something about Um Raquba.” Um Raquba, which meant “mother of shelter” in Sudanese Arabic, was where thousands of Ethiopian Jews, known as Falashas, were being interned. They were part of the exodus of hundreds of thousands of people from famine-racked Ethiopia, now living in refugee camps in eastern Sudan. When Weaver visited Um Raquba, about eight Falashas a day were dying of starvation. Weaver had seen “shit holes” all over Sudan, but Um Raquba was the worst: a squishy sea of mud with thousands crammed into grass huts. There was little food or water and few blankets.

  Jerry Weaver, the State Department refugee coordinator in Sudan in 1984 who helped rescue the Jews of Ethiopia, with a lion he had just hunted. A colleague said Weaver was living in the wrong century.

  Weaver went to Horan, who slyly, nonchalantly told him to cable the State Department about “everything you’ve seen and heard.” Horan knew this would be a sensitive issue in Washington on account of the Jewish lobby, and was careful not to ignore it, or even downgrade it. This cable would start a process whereby Weaver would gradually emerge as a go-between. He was the hub of a network that included Sudanese officials and intelligence agents and Israeli officials and intelligence agents, all talking to each other—never directly—but only through Jerry Weaver, who had designed a rescue plan for the Falashas practically on his own, with Hume Horan’s quiet, unflinching support.

  At first, the Israelis wanted to stage a rescue: to get fellow Jews who were starving out of the clutches of an Arab country. But at a meeting in Geneva, Weaver bluntly told them, “If you try it, the Sudanese are just going to shoot you down. My friends in Sudan state security told me so….There’s only one way to do this thing. You’ve got to move these people from Um Raquba to Gedaref and from Gedaref to Khartoum airport…with the full cooperation of Sudanese security. You need a few vehicles, planes, and state security escorts.”

  “Would the Sudanese agree to this?” one Israeli asked.

  “I’ll ask ’em,” Weaver shot back.

  The area of eastern Sudan under discussion was one Weaver knew well. It was where he often went hunting for gazelles.

  Weaver’s mind soon began working in overdrive. There were so many things to think about. Blankets were needed for waiting in the cold, food in case the planes were late, potable water at the transfer points, a sideband 500-mile radio operating on its own frequency, at least 50 metric tons of fuel for the buses, lubricants, auto mechanics, and a garage for the buses, the buses themselves, the drivers, Nissan patrol vehicles, etc., and none of this could be bought on the open market in Khartoum, or else everyone would find out what was going on.

  Soon afterward, Georges Gutelman, a Belgian Orthodox Jew, would arrive in Khartoum. He was stocky with dark hair and spoke a number of languages, including Arabic. He ran a charter plane company and, as he told Weaver and Horan, had a lot of experience in the “extraction” business. The Sudanese weren’t sure who he was, even as he bribed people in the control tower. “And when the whole operation blew up in a publicity storm, he was gone without a trace,” Weaver told me.

  Operation Moses, as it came to be known in history, began a few days before Thanksgiving. Weaver, in a field jacket, carrying a long cane, and armed with a Walther pistol, oversaw the vehicles and transfers at Khartoum airport. From November 21, 1984, until January 5, 1985, Gutelman’s airline flew thirty-five nighttime flights from Khartoum to Tel Aviv by way of Brussels. The morning after each flight Weaver notified Horan in his office and then cabled Washington.

  Horan told Weaver that he would like to see the operation in progress.

  “Yeah, no problem, Mr. Ambassador. Come on over to my place around 1:30 a.m. and we’ll go to the airport together.”

  At Weaver’s house Horan’s eyes took in all the guns, scopes, magnum shot, mec reloaders, and other paraphernalia of Weaver’s strange life. Horan knew that Weaver was “somewhat of a wild man,” but he hadn’t expected such a “pirate’s den.” Years later, Horan explained to me his tolerance of Weaver this way:

  “I knew Weaver had his problems. He was living in the wrong century, a gun-in-pants-type fellow. His personal life was messy, sure. Stories went around the embassy about his local bimbos, and whatever else he did at night. But if I had transferred responsibility for the operation to your conventional, cover-your-ass FSO—the kind who dots his i’s and fills in his travel vouchers the first morning back from a trip—the Falashas would never have left Sudan. But Weaver had enough swash and buckle in him to break through any barrier.” Weaver, during the months of planning and executing the operation, coordinating between Israelis and Arabs who never spoke to each other, was like a man juggling bombs with fuses lit, ready to go off.

  Indeed, Horan added that Weaver had needed to handle large amounts of cash from the Israeli Mossad for payoffs and equipment purchases involving Sudanese Arabs during the operation, “and he did it without any of the money sticking to his fingers.”

  From Weaver’s house the two of them drove to the airport. The ambassador lingered inside the car, watching through the window as four buses pulled up in the night to planeside and a dark, moving sea of humanity, straight out of a biblical time warp, began climbing up the ramp. Horan got out and made the rounds of Sudanese security officers, showing the flag as it were. Then he entered the plane, eyeing three Israeli doctors and nurses going up and down the aisle, ministering to people who had never seen a plane before. “They were all so silent. They had no suitcases, just the clothes on their backs. We went on for weeks, just pumping them out of Sudan,” Horan said.

  Weaver recalled that “the ambassador’s eyes were lit up in shock and amazement, as if the whole thing was a revelation to him.” Horan would tell me, “I felt that at that moment we were really behaving like Americans should: that this was what the Foreign Service was all about.”

  By the time Operation Moses was completed, some 10,000 Ethiopian Jews had been flown from an Arab League country to Israel.

  Media leaks about the event in early 1985 led to Weaver’s life being threatened. He had to leave in a hurry, with no time to pack more than an overnight bag. Embassy security officers had to collect his personal effects. And that turned out to be Weaver’s undoing. The American security types didn’t like the dirty dishes and the rest of the mess in the house, or the crossed spears or ivory tusks, or the skin of a lion that Weaver had killed covering his bed, either. FSOs, as a rule, collect exotic bric-a-brac, but this was simply too much. They took the place apart. First they found the marijuana, and then the guns, and then the gold bullion, which Weaver had kept in his house safe as a small investment. An inch-thick security file about Weaver was slammed on a desk in Washington. In 1987, consigned to a desk job in an annex of the State Department that offered no possibilities of promotion, Weaver resigned from the Foreign Service. They don’t fire you in bureaucracies, they let you rot. He died in Ohio completely forgotten in 2016.2

  “Jerry Weaver was the ultimate cowboy for good,” says Gene Dewey, who managed him from Washington. “I remember when we were in Europe together for a meeting about the Falasha rescue plan, Jerry asked me to take back to the States for him a custom-made Austrian rifle with a Leica scope,” Dewey laughs. Truly, Weaver was larger than life. He was a kind of Oskar Schindler in the desert.

  * * *

  —

  Dewey told Gersony that his job in Khartoum would be to help repair the diplo
matic fallout that Operation Moses and Jerry Weaver had left behind, owing to the public embarrassment suffered by the Sudanese Arab regime, and get the refugee office in the U.S. Embassy working smoothly again. After all, Sudan was a way station in the midst of regional chaos that went far beyond the Falashas. There were almost three-quarters of a million famine-stricken Eritreans and Tigreans trekking from Marxist, Amhara-dominated Ethiopia into eastern Sudan. (This necessitated a cross-border feeding program, which got food aid inside Ethiopia from Sudan to stem the flow of refugees.) Moreover, there were more than 100,000 refugees trekking from eastern Chad into western Sudan. Indeed, famine and disorder were affecting nearly one-fifth of Sudan’s population of 22 million. There were also West Nile refugees from Obote’s ethnic killing machine who had fled Uganda and crossed into southern Sudan. Finally, there was an ongoing war between the Arab Muslim north of Sudan and the African animist and Christian south of Sudan.

  Sudan was partly why, back in the day, the 1980s were considered the decade of refugees. Though few remember that now.

  Given the sprawling complexity of Gersony’s new assignment, Dewey decided to travel with Gersony to Khartoum, in order to introduce him around the embassy and the NGO community.

  They arrived in Khartoum from London at three in the morning. The airport was utter anarchy. It was actually the first time in his career that Gersony was stricken by acute culture shock. It had never happened to him anywhere in Latin America, or in Bangkok, and not even in Kampala. The arrivals building at Khartoum airport was like a series of dark, gangrenous prison cells suffocating in an intense heat that grabbed your lungs in a vise, with broken lightbulbs and banana peels on the floor. Everyone was yelling and pulling at you. Dewey was unfazed. On the other side of this hell there was a car waiting to take them to the Hilton hotel.