The Good American Page 21

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  One interviewee, Gersony’s 163rd, seemed especially strong and smart, with a jazz-type goatee. He said he was a “technician” from Namarroi district in north-central Mozambique. RENAMO abducted him and used him as a porter. He said he had made thirty trips the year before, showing Gersony the deep cracks in his heels. He would march sixteen hours per day, carrying ammunition in metal boxes, in addition to guns, cases of beer, and blankets. He estimated that each column was composed of dozens of porters and many more RENAMO soldiers. Porters who could not keep up with the pace were beaten with a shamboko, a special stick. When two men refused to continue, they were shot on the spot. Women, including wives, were frequently raped by the Matsanga, he said, and their husbands beaten. On one occasion, he and about sixty other men had their hands tied behind their backs by RENAMO, and then were left in a compound for several days without food and water. Finally, RENAMO soldiers threw pieces of cassava over the wall and the prisoners struggled on their knees to eat, unable to use their hands. Four men died. After he was released, he made his escape to Malawi in three days of walking. This refugee, who was at a RENAMO base in Mongola in central Mozambique several times during his portering treks, said he had seen white advisers there, presumably South Africans, a confirmation of the apartheid regime’s support for what RENAMO was doing.

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  Every story had been told to him in isolation. Yet each story added weight to, rather than contradicted, the others. And thus Gersony had no choice but to believe them. After a lifetime of interviewing people uprooted from their homes, Gersony explains that refugees come in the following three categories:

  Émigrés: Refugees settled in usually comfortable economic circumstances abroad. These people, he says, have “little or no credibility, mainly because they are years removed from what is happening now in their homelands, and in addition have a political agenda of their own to push.” One thinks of the czarist sympathizers in Europe in the decades following the Bolshevik revolution, or the Iraqi exiles who fooled American officials in the run-up to the Iraq War.

  The exiled intelligentsia: They, too, have little credibility because their accounts are full of political calculation.

  The ordinary people with whom Gersony has spent a lifetime in Mozambique and elsewhere on several continents: “These people have no agenda or ability in political calculation. They are at the end of the chain of events set in motion by more powerful and educated classes. They are the eyewitnesses to history in real time, literally staggering across borders and across districts within their own country. They are also the ones,” he goes on, “with real get-up-and-go like my parents. There is a big assumption out there that lack of education means you’re not smart. That’s not true. Uneducated people can still be very good observers, with very good memories.”

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  Back in Maputo after weeks in the Mozambique bush and savanna country, and saying goodbye to his pilot and two translators, Gersony flew 1,500 miles north to the Tanzanian capital of Dar es Salaam. From there he headed south to near the border with Mozambique, to interview people in more refugee camps. He spent almost a week along the Tanzania-Mozambique border, a region hundreds of miles away from all the people he had thus far encountered. But he kept hearing the same story: RENAMO…RENAMO…Matsanga.

  At one camp in southern Tanzania officials insisted he stay in the “VIP quarters,” even though it was so hot that he wanted to spend the night outside in his sleeping bag. The “VIP quarters” was a thatched hut like most of the others, but with a table and cot. It was malaria territory, so he placed two mosquito coils by the cot. He was exhausted and fell into a deep sleep. Suddenly in the middle of the night he awoke. Something was not right, he felt. He reached over for his flashlight and saw that his body was covered in ticks that had fallen from the ceiling, drugged by the mosquito coils. With his box of matches, he burned each off, one by one, then took his sleeping bag outside and fell asleep for two hours.

  Next he flew more than 1,500 miles back south to Swaziland, which like South Africa bordered the southern extremity of Mozambique. Despite the colorful, birdlike traditional costumes of the inhabitants, he got a hint of next-door South Africa from the high-performance cars parked outside the bars and nightclubs of Mbabane, the Swazi capital: like Maputo, wealthy white South Africans came here to sample interracial sex, still forbidden at home. He ignored it all and concentrated on visiting more refugee camps, where he heard more horrifying stories about RENAMO…RENAMO…Matsanga.

  In Mbabane, Swazi officials insisted that he meet the king, Mswati III. “I was exhausted. The meeting was a real pain in the ass. I have no memory of it. I just wanted to work. I was afraid that meeting the king would make RENAMO agents aware of what I was doing.” As it happened, nobody bothered about him.

  Finally he flew to Pretoria, the capital of South Africa, the belly of the RENAMO beast. His research was practically done. His notebooks were in a classified safe in the U.S. Embassy in Maputo. So he was much less afraid of being exposed, and he wanted to be able to report that he had investigated the war from the other side. It would give him street cred, he figured.

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  Pretoria, South Africa, 1988. “Whites only” signs slung over restaurants, government buildings, and the many parks. Wide streets lined with jacaranda trees, laid out in an austere grid pattern, and swept clean by black laborers in blue coveralls. Reddish-brown Union Buildings of this executive and administrative capital, reflecting the staid and stolid mentality of the city’s Afrikaner founders.8 For Gersony this sterile city, so hushed and orderly, was a shock (as well as a bit depressing) after the cheerful cacophony of car horns, roaring mini-buses, shouts of market vendors, and loud conversations in several tribal languages that characterized the other capitals he had visited. The lingua franca was Afrikaans, a Dutch dialect brought by Protestant settlers in the seventeenth century, rather than the English and the softer Portuguese to which he had become accustomed.

  Because of the enormous size of the U.S. Embassy in Pretoria, and with so much else going on there, he was considered just another contractor, not central to embassy concerns. Thus, he saw no one higher than a political officer. The AID office got him a translator. But there was a CIA guy, young with a pencil-thin mustache, who seemed impressed by his methodology, and so Gersony had an idea. He knew he was headed into a firestorm in Washington. He knew his work, despite the almost two hundred interviews and six countries covered, would not be judged on its merits. Washington, after all, was less about deep reportage than about opinions held by policy grandees who never went anywhere except for conferences and CODELS (congressional delegation tours). In the midst of this buzz saw, the one organization that the White House would be sure to have check out his reporting with was the CIA. Thus, a CIA endorsement, from Pretoria especially, would be a boost.

  “Why don’t you come along with me?” Gersony asked the CIA officer casually.

  After getting his per diem approved, the CIA officer agreed.

  The three of them, including the translator, drove east several hundred miles on the best roads Gersony had seen in sub-Saharan Africa. They passed through Kruger National Park and saw the wild animals in the game preserve. It was the closest Gersony got to real tourism.

  At a refugee camp on the South Africa–Mozambique border, Gersony asked the CIA guy to pick out a few people for him to interview. He did, and the story from each was the same: RENAMO…RENAMO…Matsanga. Gersony, satisfied, knew that the guy would file a cable to headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

  At the embassy back in Maputo, Gersony spent several days typing up his last 12 interviews in South Africa, and going through the entire 196 of them with yellow, orange, and blue highlighting markers, with the blue denoting the highest order of significance. He k
new he had Ambassador Wells on his side, but she was already suspect in the eyes of Jesse Helms and the rest of the right wing. Thus, he also wanted the support of Ambassador James Rawlings, the Reagan political appointee, in Harare. So he asked the DCM in Maputo, Mike Ranneberger, if he would fly with him to Harare where he would deliver the full brief first as a dress rehearsal to both Ranneberger and the DCM there, Ed Fugit. Both were experienced Africa hands and they would constitute a good murder board. Ranneberger, “that hyperactive son-of-a-bitch, actually said ‘yes.’ ”

  Ranneberger explains: “I saw the trip to Harare as a way to build regional support for what Bob was doing. His report was an opportunity not to be missed, since it would allow the embassy in Maputo greater leverage with the FRELIMO government,” owing to the political ammunition about RENAMO the embassy could supply.

  Gersony took a day to brief Ranneberger and Fugit in the latter’s house in Harare. “I remember Bob going through page after page of a yellow legal pad. The thoroughness of it all, there was so much attention to detail,” Ranneberger remembers, closing his eyes for a moment.

  The next day Ambassador Jim Rawlings gave Gersony two hours of his time. Cables went out from Maputo and Harare to Jonathan Moore and Chet Crocker in Washington.

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  In Washington, Gersony delivered the long, six-hour version of his brief to Jonathan Moore, complete with maps. Moore, delighted, was excited about the policy battle to come.

  “Don’t speak to anybody about this,” he ordered Gersony.

  Meanwhile, Moore called Chet Crocker, who offered Gersony one hour of his time. Gersony refused, saying that “Chet’s neck will be on the line over this, so he will need to know all the details.” Gersony was by now acting a bit like a prima donna. But Crocker relented and gave him two consecutive two p.m. to five p.m. slots in his office, to be joined by Chas Freeman and Roy Stacy, the deputy assistant secretaries. Though both briefings were after lunchtime, nobody nodded out for even a moment. Crocker, grinning at the end, said he wanted the written report on his desk in a week. Gersony pleaded for several weeks, since he still hadn’t analyzed all the data from the 196 interviews.

  “No, I need it in a week,” Crocker said. “Because if word leaks out about the report, the Left will accuse me of suppressing it.”

  “Give him two weeks,” said Moore quietly, a tone of voice somewhat rare for him.

  “All right,” said Crocker.

  Gersony knew he needed help. Specifically, he needed someone who could collate on a computer all his systematic data from the interviews—the total number of rapes, murders, and so on that people had seen with their own eyes, meshing it all with time frames and geographical locations, and then using these numbers to project fatality rates for the whole Mozambican population.

  He asked a friend at USAID from his Guatemala days, Jane Kochman, if she knew anyone who could help. “Well, there’s Cindy Davis,” Jane said. Cindy was ten years younger than Bob, the adopted daughter of a Naval Academy graduate. She had been educated at Wellesley and was now a contractor for the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA) in the State Department. She was also part of an OFDA committee to decide what kind of computer system to introduce there, this being the early days of widespread computer use. “I was very good with information management,” she says. Bob will never forget his first memory of Cindy Davis: a cute girl with a miniskirt and high heels. “I really need your help!” he pleaded. “No, I can’t,” she answered, explaining that she already had a full-time job, while also working on a master’s degree at George Washington University. “I wouldn’t give up. I kept working on her, and she relented.”

  “Bob was really in a state of nervousness,” Cindy recalls. “He took me down to the State Department cafeteria and told me he had sensitive data that had to be extracted and organized into an analysis. It sounded fascinating and I always cared about refugees and human rights, and he already had a reputation.”

  Cindy and Bob began pulling all the data together from his typed notes in Moore’s seventh-floor office. “It was a drama that emerged in the silence of data analysis,” she says. “This person in this refugee camp talking about the same incident as that person in a displaced persons camp many miles apart. I became attracted to Bob. He was smart and compelling.”

  A few days after they had begun working together, Cindy passed a handwritten note on a small piece of paper to Bob. It read: “From Chet to Bob: meet me tomorrow to brief Shultz in his office.” He had moved up another peg, he momentarily thought to himself.

  The office of the secretary of state is long and ornate with a fireplace. On the afternoon of March 28, 1988, Gersony saw Jonathan Moore and Chester Crocker waiting for him at the entrance. Then George Shultz arrived with a woman. “I’d like you all to meet Maureen Reagan,” he said. The president’s eldest child was particularly close to him, and also active on policy issues. Gersony was shown to a small couch. Directly facing him in two chairs as they all sat down were Maureen Reagan and the secretary of state. Crocker and Moore sat to the side, a bit in the background. They had arranged the seating so that the secretary of state and the president’s daughter would get the full-bore Gersony treatment.

  “Go ahead,” Shultz said.

  Gersony unloaded with his methodology, description of his refugee interviews, and his conclusions. The woman with the black kerchief who had let go of her daughter’s hand, the forced portering, the rapes, the mutilations, the killing of babies, were all crammed into the one-hour brief: the grim highlights of his six-hour talk. He was never interrupted. The president’s daughter was visibly moved. Shultz was angry at the substance of the material, and occasionally shook his head slightly. Neither was accustomed to this sort of brief. Shultz bore down on Crocker with his typical Buddha-like, chairman-of-the-board face: “Is there anything the South Africans won’t stoop to?”9 The secretary of state then turned to Maureen: “What do we do?”

  “I’m having dinner with Dad tomorrow night. This is what I’m going to talk about,” she said.

  Shultz actually met twice with Reagan over the next week.10 Following that came an April 12 meeting in the White House attended by the president, Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci, National Security Adviser Colin Powell, Deputy Chief of Staff Kenneth Duberstein, and many other officials and conservative luminaries who filled every seat at the vast cabinet table.11 The subject was the Afghan peace agreement12 and the unfinished business of the Reagan administration, particularly the Reagan Doctrine, that required attention in the final nine months of the president’s second term. What other guerrilla movements in the world required Reagan Doctrine help? Someone reportedly raised the question of RENAMO, requesting that those “freedom fighters”—a term both romantic and deceptive—finally get support.

  According to one source, Reagan put up his hand, and armed with his trademark, deadly serious half smile, said:

  “Hold it right there, fellas. We have a report coming out next week showing that RENAMO is a bunch of murderers.” He then recounted some of their atrocities. “Don’t ever mention RENAMO again in my presence. And if you’re smart, you’ll drop the subject.”13

  In fact, Shultz had just a few days earlier slipped into Reagan’s hands a one-page “out-of-system breast-pocket memo” that Roy Stacy and Chet Crocker had drafted about the substance of Gersony’s report.

  The conservative luminaries were stunned. The president had spoken. Policy had been made. It was that simple. This was a big vindication for Crocker, helped by the fact that the CIA and embassy cables from southern Africa were now vouching for Gersony, who was able to state in the ensuing media debate that Crocker had sent him out to Mozambique with no instructions or agenda of any kind, further buttressing the Africa bureau’s claim to objectivity. More help had come from British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who had previously met FRELIMO leaders Samora Machel
and Joaquim Chissano and was impressed by their moderation. Crocker explains that it was the trio of Bob Gersony, Maureen Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher that ultimately convinced Reagan not to support RENAMO.

  Meanwhile, Gersony was working feverishly in Moore’s office and in his New York apartment on his IBM Selectric, with extra white-out and ink ribbons, on the final draft of his report, leaching out of the copy any word that might indicate emotion of any kind. Even words such as “but” and “only” were sometimes suspect, because of the way they could create emphasis. He wanted the writing to be flat, clinical, without a hint of politics, thus stripping the copy down to facts and the statistical analysis that Cindy Davis had helped him with.

  Moore liked every word of the report except for the recommendations at the end and the title that Gersony gave it, “Why Mozambicans Flee.” The recommendations Moore felt would merely distract from the heart of the report, which was about the crimes of RENAMO. Moore also complained that the title “sounded too much like an advocacy report.” He advised Gersony to come up with a dull bureaucratic title, to further enhance the objectivity of the material. The final published title would be “Summary of Mozambican Refugee Accounts of Principally Conflict-Related Experience in Mozambique.” It was barely grammatical. Because no one could ever remember such a title, it would become well known as simply “the Gersony report.” No one knew at the time that there would be a more famous “Gersony report” having to do with Rwanda six years hence. Moore’s advice succeeded beyond his imagining, so much so that Moore himself would be forgotten in the affair, with Gersony getting all the Washington media attention, even though Moore had been the bureaucratic driver behind Gersony’s work in Mozambique from the beginning.