Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy: A Memoir (6 page)

“Just make sure our people show some guts,” he responded, then lit another cigarette.

A
fter my first assignment in Belgrade, I went back to the State Department in the summer of 1980 and worked as a watch officer in the Operations Center for a year, before transferring to the Policy Planning Staff as a staff assistant, also a one-year assignment. The Operations Center is the eyes and ears of the State Department, a twenty-four-hour facility on the seventh floor where telephone calls, telegrams, and news wires come fast and furious, some requiring alerts to senior officials in the department, often in the dead of night. One moment there is a call from someone in a distant embassy reporting a coup. The next, it is a senior department official asking to be put through to another. Though it’s a glorified switchboard position, it is nonetheless considered a prestigious job requiring the recommendation of a senior officer, in my case Ambassador Eagleburger. But for anyone who joined the State Department to have an impact on policy, it was far from that. It is tough being a junior officer in the State Department. Pay is low, as is the self-esteem of someone so junior to everyone else and so distant from any decision making.

My duties in the Policy Planning Staff (an office created in 1947 and whose first director was the iconic diplomat George Kennan) included maintaining a looseleaf binder of “talking points” that covered virtually every subject in the world for use by senior officials in public settings. My job wasn’t to write them, but to collect them from grouchy midlevel officers manning desks throughout the State Department who were responsible for writing them and getting them cleared by other relevant offices. In the era before email, the job involved logging a lot of miles running through the department halls to collect the latest versions of the guidance.

After Belgrade, my next overseas assignment was Warsaw, Poland. I arrived there in July 1983, after nine months of Polish language training at the Foreign Service Institute in Arlington, Virginia, with my growing family of a son, Nathaniel, and a daughter, Amelia, on the way. Poland in 1983 was a sad place indeed. The Solidarity era of 1979–81 was long gone after the imposition of martial law by General Wojciech Jaruzelski in December 1981 and the rounding up and imprisonment of Solidarity’s senior leadership. It was a gloomy country that seemed painted in so many shades of gray. Trips to West Berlin, eight hours away on Poland’s narrow, bumpy highways, were a welcome respite. As we would pull through the checkpoint, it was just like
The Wizard of Oz:
black-and-white would suddenly turn to color. Once on a Friday afternoon dash to Berlin, a Polish policeman stopped me outside Lodz, about halfway to Berlin, for speeding and asked rhetorically why I was going so fast. My explanation that I was “going west” was more than enough for him and he waved me on.

There was something indefatigable about Poland’s people. Abandoned to their fate on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain in 1945, they never seemed to give up on where their rightful place should be, even if many of us—myself included—thought at the time that nothing could ever be done.

During those years in the mid-1980s, there was little to cheer for. The heady days of Solidarity had given way to Jaruzelski’s martial law, which in the Polish language is literally translated as “state of war.” Even the
Catholic Church, which for centuries had been the protector of Poland’s independent nationhood, seemed exhausted by the lack of hope for the future. One Sunday in St. John’s Cathedral in Warsaw’s old town, I heard for the first time the expression “inner emigration,” and the concern expressed by the priest giving the sermon that the Polish people were tuning out and otherwise giving up. In October 1984, a Catholic priest, Father Jerzy Popieluszko, was found murdered, a victim of members of the secret police. Hundreds of thousands of Poles turned out in the streets for his funeral.

The American embassy remained the proverbial beacon of hope, one that assured Poland that we would never abandon their aspirations. Back in the States, Poland under martial law became a main theme in Ronald Reagan’s first term when the president uttered the expression “let Poland be Poland,” but it was a sentiment shared on both sides of America’s political divide. Trade unions, including the AFL-CIO, under Lane Kirkland, had embraced Solidarity, even though that Polish independent trade union was a political movement whose scope was far more than a trade union. The AFL-CIO kept Solidarity afloat financially and helped it maintain offices outside Poland, including in Brussels, Belgium, where the sometimes wobbly Europeans needed to be reminded that Poland was not giving up on its future as a free country.

Our science attaché, John Zerolis, was arrested in early 1983 in a setup by the Polish security services for giving assistance to Solidarity (which consisted of U.S. magazine literature, including a copy of
Newsweek
) and summarily expelled from the country. When I saw John after he had returned to the States, his future was unclear as the department scrambled to find him a new assignment. His advice on dealing with the Polish communist security services was very clear. “Whatever you do, don’t look angry, because to some it will look like you are scared. Just smile, because in the end we are going to be proven right, and they will be shown to be wrong.”

• • •

Despite optimistic expressions of the inevitable triumph of freedom by Reagan, Kirkland, and, for that matter, John Zerolis, by 1985 I had had
enough of dark and gray Eastern Europe. I looked forward to pivoting to an assignment in East Asia, in South Korea, where I served as an economic officer from 1985 to 1988. Korea’s future seemed as bright as Poland’s was dim, and I marveled at the energy and bustle of its people. On my arrival I met the U.S. ambassador, a courtly gentleman professor and political appointee from South Carolina named Richard Walker, who went by the name Dixie. In my first meeting with Dixie Walker he asked me to compare what I thought of authoritarian Korea under the current president, General Chun Doo-Hwan, and Poland under martial law and General Jaruzelski. “In a matter of a few years, Korea’s political system will be unrecognizable from what it is today. Korea is on its way to success, and nothing can stop it now,” I told him. As for Poland, “Ten years from now, perhaps a hundred years from now, Poland will be sadly the same.” If I had shown any wisdom in making the first prediction, I undermined myself in the second. Poland, in fact, was on its way as well.

By 1987, South Korea was moving fast. Demonstrations broke out in Seoul, less than a year before the 1988 Summer Olympics were to get under way. The Olympics were not a catalyst for change in Korea, but neither were they irrelevant to it. As a Korean friend explained, “We don’t want the world to see us as a first-rate economy with a third-rate political system.” He continued, “If we are to be accepted into the ranks of important countries (if nothing else, Koreans believe in rankings), we need to have a real democracy.” I thought of the poor Poles, still mired with third-rate everything, and the fact that becoming a democracy was something that did not seem to depend on their aspirations alone.

In 1988, I returned to the United States for an excursion tour as an aide to New York congressman Stephen Solarz. Solarz’s district was in Brooklyn, where he saw to the interests of a melting pot of hyphenated Americans, including those from Poland. His energy and enthusiasm were apparent in everything he did, especially traveling to distant countries and reporting back to those constituents who felt in Solarz they had someone who, like them, would not forget the old country. A year later I
became the desk officer responsible for Poland. By the summer of 1989, Poland (only four years after my prediction to Ambassador Walker) was now the catalyst for a process that would sweep through Eastern Europe. Just before transferring to the department to take up my duties as the desk officer, I took a trip with Solarz to Yugoslavia, Poland, Hungary, and still-slumbering Czechoslovakia and East Germany. We met the pantheon of Solidarity figures who had been imprisoned when I served in Poland a few years before and who were now considering how to take over the government they had defeated in the June 1989 elections. I talked to Jacek Kuron, who had suffered in prison for many years but was now widely expected to be a member of a new noncommunist government, the first since World War II.

“How did you organize the elections in such a short time?” I asked him, noting that the communists had hoped that the short time between agreeing to elections and election day would ensure them some seats and therefore some legitimacy.

“Each candidate posed for a picture with Lech Walesa, which became each candidate’s campaign poster,” he explained.

“That simple?”

“Look,” Kuron replied. “If a cow had had a campaign picture with Walesa, the cow would have won, too.” How could I have ever bet against such people?

Being a desk officer is a step up the policy ladder from serving in the Operations Center, but there is a lot to aspire to after that: deputy officer director, office director, deputy assistant secretary, principal deputy assistant secretary, and assistant secretary positions. But being responsible for the day-to-day relations with Poland that summer and for the two succeeding years was an extraordinary opportunity. Poland seemed like the center of the universe that year. Lech Walesa addressed a joint session of Congress, famously starting his speech with “ ‘We the People.’ As an electrician from Gdansk I believe I am empowered to use that phrase.” Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki made an official visit to the White House,
preparations for which fell on the desk. I made several trips to Warsaw and Krakow during those two years, caught up with old friends from my time in Poland a few years before. They were now liberated from a system, as Czech president Vaclav Havel said at the time, “whose purpose no one can now understand.”

I marveled at the changes that were under way. On a visit to Warsaw I witnessed the toppling of communist statues, including that of the first KGB director, a Pole named Felix Dzerzhinsky (who had a statue, so the communist-era joke went, because he had killed more Russians than any of his countrymen). I stood on the side of Dzerzhinsky Square with a junior officer from the embassy, together with many happy Poles, watching the construction crew remove the statue in what would soon regain its precommunist name of Bankers’ Square.

The summer months in 1989 were a whirlwind of developments for Poland as I managed the day-to-day tasks in the department. With the Solidarity government set to formally take the reins of power in Warsaw, I got to my State Department office early that day to receive the first telegram reports (there were no live feeds) from our embassy in Warsaw about the speech to the parliament of the newly installed noncommunist leader of the government, Prime Minister Mazowiecki. At the start of his speech, he promptly fainted before he was revived to continue to describe the program this government was about to pursue to revive the country.

Two weeks later, Deputy Prime Minister Leszek Balcerowicz visited Washington to enlist support for his radical efforts to transform the economy from a command-style communist model to a wide-open capitalist system. I had known Leszek from my days in Warsaw when he was just another brilliant Polish academic, one who like many others had long understood the dead end toward which Poland was limping. Now he was charged with a program of transformation that would be known as the Balcerowicz Plan (a name that he had no part in creating). I met him at the main Diplomatic Entrance of the State Department and chatted with him as we made our way up the elevator to the waiting room just outside
then acting secretary Eagleburger’s office. Balcerowicz looked around at the oil paintings on the walls and asked who was in the largest portrait. “That’s George Marshall,” I explained. Balcerowicz then took a close look at the author of the Marshall Plan, the post–World War II economic program of assistance that had restored Europe. He stood back to take one more look and said softly, “A good omen.”

Eagleburger greeted him warmly and made no secret that the United States was completely committed to the success of the new Polish government. As I watched Eagleburger’s performance art, I almost forgot my role as the note taker. I marveled at the way he turned a person he had never met before into a close friend.

• • •

A year and a half later, in April 1991, I accompanied newly elected Polish president Lech Walesa on a trip to the West Coast. The visits included a meeting with former president Ronald Reagan at his presidential library, which was still under construction. The two men laughed and joked throughout the lunch, with Walesa playing the role of the skeptic as to the completion date of the presidential library as he pondered the batts of insulation hanging exposed from the ceiling and the unconnected wires sticking out of walls. A piece of the Berlin Wall stood on the grounds and the photographers asked the two men to pretend to be pushing on it. I stood back to watch this odd scene, but I found myself nodding in approval, realizing there was something very real in what I had been watching.

But by 1991 it was over. Eastern Europe, now redubbed by many Central Europe to highlight the fact that the Soviet Union’s western republics were themselves beginning to change, became quiescent, more interesting perhaps to work on than the Benelux countries, but increasingly similar. The adrenaline of the summer of 1989 was finally wearing off, and in looking for an overseas assignment I looked for a place that like Poland in the 1980s was beginning to stir. That country was Albania.

One of the problems with accepting an assignment like Albania was
how incomprehensible it is to people outside the service. “What did you do wrong?” was a common, only half-joking reaction. But I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to open a post that had been closed since 1946, when Albania became the North Korea of Europe. Sealed off from the rest of the continent for forty-five years, it had slipped into a dark age and become a country that time forgot. A brutal dictatorship had kept it out of Europe, and out of the mind’s eye.