in the Lockerbie air crash tragedy). After a day in the professor’s company, during which his Congolese academic friends and their wives included me in their (literally) warm embrace—because it looked odd to be hugging him and not me—I invited these academics to a buffet supper at our apartment. I already knew that the Zairian government (their employer) tried to discourage contacts with American diplomats. For this reason, some of my embassy colleagues tried to prepare me for a disappointing turnout at my party, but almost all the professors and wives I invited came.
I began to realize how fortunate it was that our apartment was situated on the eleventh floor of one of Kinshasa’s few attractive modern buildings. Our guests enjoyed the spectacular view from our terrace of the widest part of the Congo River, just where the rapids start to push the river 850 feet downward and nearly a hundred miles westward to the Atlantic Ocean. I came to realize only later, when my work portfolio changed, that one of the biggest pluses of where John and I lived was that it was in a big apartment building occupied by many Congolese and other VIPs. From outside, Mobutu’s intelligence services could not guess whose apartment a visitor was coming to.
I was finding to my surprise and delight that being a woman was not a handicap to being a diplomat in the Congo. One of my new Congolese friends pointed out that people could recognize me because I was wearing a skirt, whereas many Congolese had difficulty distinguishing one white face from another. Indeed, the only problems I had as a woman diplomat in the Congo came from within my own embassy. A few weeks into my new job in Kinshasa, I was still waiting to be called to meet the ambassador’s plane and carry his bags when I found to my chagrin that he was calling on my more senior colleagues in the political section to do what was clearly my job as protocol officer. I finally got up the nerve to go see the ambassador and ask him straight out why he wasn’t letting me do my protocol job.
The ambassador was a career officer but a rather conventional kind of man and had evidently not been raised by a mother like mine. He grudgingly confessed that he felt uncomfortable about having the wife of his economic counselor getting up in the middle of the night to meet his plane and carry his suitcases. Knowing that John did not share his views, I had my answer ready: “How do you think it makes me feel—or, for that matter, the poor guy who has to get up in the night to do my job—that you are not letting me do what I am assigned to do?”
Taken aback, he said, “I never thought of that.”
“Well, sir,” I said, “I am asking you to think of it from now on.”
Fortunately, I got on well with my boss, Bob Remole, who came from the mountains of the Far West and was more devoted to Save the Planet, World Wildlife Fund, and Amnesty International issues than to the conduct of traditional foreign policy. Dismayed at how little room there was in the State Department’s realpolitik foreign policy for someone with his priorities, he was planning to retire at the end of this tour.
Remole was upset that our government was, for Cold War reasons, on such supportive terms with President Mobutu, a half-educated, charismatic African dictator. Mobutu’s chief virtue for us was that he was not a communist and he allowed us to use staging places in his country to support rebels in neighboring communist-led Angola. (I did not then know—though I suspected—the big role of the CIA in putting him in power and keeping him there.)
Mobutu was notorious for his own corrupt acts and for encouraging corruption by his government. The rot ran from the top ministers on down to the cop on the beat, the soldier on patrol, even the prison guard. In recent years Mobutu had presented himself as a nearly God-like figure in his television broadcasts and had bestowed on himself ever more high-flown titles, one of his more modest being that of Zaire’s Guide Eclairé (enlightened guide).
My boss passed on to me the useful fact that Dean Hinton, our current ambassador’s predecessor, had been declared persona non grata (PNG) and expelled by Mobutu, allegedly for having shown disdain for the Enlightened Guide of Zaire by arriving one weekend afternoon at the official presidential residence in his tennis shorts to deliver an urgent message to Mobutu from Washington. According to Remole, our current ambassador lived in terror of being PNG’d himself. The barely hidden, though unspoken, moral of this story went: It would be best to avoid doing things that would anger Mobutu, because the ambassador would probably not back you up.
I occasionally had more substantive work to do than meeting my ambassador’s plane. In November 1978, soon after I came officially onto Kinshasa’s payroll, I was assigned to make my first demarche. As I explained in a letter to my mother: “This is where I go to the Foreign Ministry and say (in French) that ‘my government has instructed me to say. . . .’ And then I listen with yogic concentration while the man in charge of—in this case—United Nations affairs replies. I then make notes the moment I escape from his office and send a cable to Washington telling his part of it.”
I enjoyed doing it. I went over without phoning ahead because, as often happened, neither our phones nor theirs were working. When I finally took the elevator to an upper floor where he had his office, he was out, and I waited fully an hour for him to return. He turned out to be an extremely pleasant Congolese in his midthirties who spoke good French and was able to cope on the spot with the subject, saying nicely quotable things in reply to my demarche. I left his room, but by then the elevator had conked out and I had to descend the six flights to the accompaniment of cries of “Bon courage, Madame” at each landing, down to my waiting embassy driver and Land Rover.
Back at the office, I wrote up my message. Remole made a few sensible changes to my draft, and I got it typed on cable stationery by our secretary. Remole told me to take it along to the deputy chief of mission (DCM) and duck, because the DCM was a nitpicker. The DCM read it immediately, found the one typographical error, fixed it, signed off and said, “Congratulations on your first message from Kinshasa.”
Remole was a thoroughly decent guy, but was so offended by our policy toward Mobutu that he could not keep his views to himself when speaking to his boss, DCM Alan Davis. Davis (also an honorable man) had come to dread being lectured by his subordinate. When Remole found that I got on well with Davis, he took to using me as his messenger to the front office, where the DCM sat.
It got a bit awkward for me one day when my boss wrote a cable in which he used a bit of ironic humor. I read it before bringing it up to Davis to sign off on. I said to Remole that I thought ironic humor was always tricky when written down; it could so easily be misunderstood in Washington. Remole was rather proud of his clever remark and told me to take the cable along to the DCM. I did, but Davis sent it back to be retyped with a red line through the humorous bit. Remole showed me the mutilated cable and, with his hand shaking, said something to the effect of, “Nobody seems to want to know my views, but can’t I even make a little joke once in a while?”
I felt sorry for both him and the DCM, and a little anxious not to be caught in the middle of a battle between them. And then I remembered a quotation I had read from the great eighteenth-century wit, Dr. Samuel Johnson, who once recalled that an old tutor had said: “Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage you think is particularly fine, strike it out.” I typed it out and put it on my boss’s desk after he had left for the day.
The next morning Remole was in his cubicle when I came in, and I found my note back on my desk. He had scratched out “strike it out” and replaced it with, “cut it in half.” I laughed out loud, because, as anyone who reads my written work knows, I am addicted to overlong sentences. When Remole came back to his cubicle after lunch, the paper was back in front of him with my one-word comment: “Touché.” I heard him guffaw.
I hoped to have more demarches to make, but few came my way, and I began to wonder again what my job would amount to. The ambassador was still not using me to meet his plane or carry his bag. Fortunately, about then I acquired a new item in my portfolio that would gradually take up much of my time and even more of my interest. Robby, who was trying to pass on some of his work as he prepared to leave that summer, got the idea of passing on his entire contact list of interesting Congolese dissidents to me.
That is why, in January 1979, I found myself one afternoon taking a car ride alone with a total stranger, a tough-looking young Congolese, to an unknown destination. That