Interviews with US Diplomatic officers who served in Eritrea in the 1950s

 

Interviews with US Diplomatic officers who served in Eritrea in the 1950s

EDWARD W. MULCAHY, Vice Consul Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (1950) Consular Officer, Asmara (1950-1952) 

Edward Mulcahy was born in Massachusetts in 1921. He graduated from Tufts University in 1943, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in 1947, and served as a first Lieutenant overseas from 1943 to 1946 in the U.S. Marine Corps. His postings abroad included Mombasa, Munich, Addis Ababa, Athens, Southern, Tunisia, Lagos, and Chad. Mr. Mulcahy was interviewed in 1989 by Charles Stuart Kennedy.

 MULCAHY: This program in coming to an end within the next few months and I'd just as soon  go back to Africa." I got a private telegram from two friends of mine in African Affairs who asked if I'd like to open a consulate at Asmara. I wrote back, "Ready, willing and able; sooner the better." 

While I was in Kenya I learned a great deal about Asmara, about Eritrea and the ex-Italian colonies from some of my British friends who had been in the military service up there in the campaign against the Italians in East Africa. I knew what a delightful city Asmara was. On the map it looks dreadful, only this far away on the map from Massawa which is one of the hell holes of the world climatically at least. But Asmara is up at 7,600 feet and that's perpetual springtime there, about the same altitude as Mexico City. So I jumped at the chance of going there. This was in December of 1949. By the middle of January, I had my orders transferring me to Addis Ababa. We'd closed up our post at Amberg on January 10 and I was back in Munich.

 Q: Why were we opening a post there? Why did we want one in Asmara?

 MULCAHY: We had had an Army group there, Signal Corps, and Army Security Agency, since just after Pearl Harbour. The first Army group going out to establish a small communication station there were on board ship in Cape Town at the time of Pearl Harbour. The British, who had taken Eritrea from the Italians, were occupying it by then with a civil administration--a corporal's guard of colonial service and Indian civil service types who'd left India and were out of jobs-two British regiments of battalion strength, very small numbers of British. They kept Italian law and Italian customs but, with minor changes in force and something like 80 civilians and two regiments and few policemen, they ran this country of about a million and a half people. 

Q: Was that part of Ethiopia at that time?

 MULCAHY: No, it was not, and what it was to become was the subject of great dispute at the Big-Five Foreign Ministers' level, the whole question of the ex-Italian colonies. The reason for the rush in getting me out there, cancelling the home leave that I was well over-due for, was the fact that the United Nations Commission of Inquiry, on which we were not represented, was going out to recommend to the General Assembly what the future of Eritrea should be. They wanted me to get out there and keep Washington informed on a daily basis, if possible, what the tilt of the report or recommendations of this U. N. Commission of Inquiry would be. It consisted of South Africa, Burma, Guatemala, Norway, and a number of people from the secretariat, including two Americans. I lived in the hotel, the principal hotel, where they lived and saw them at practically all meal times and entertained them over at the small military base, then called Radio Marina. There were about 75 Americans, counting dependents, at the base then. In the three years I was there it grew to 400 people. It ultimately grew to 5,000.  

Q: That was Kagnew Station.

 MULCAHY: At that time, it was called Radio Marina because it was located in a compound occupied before the liberation by the Italian navy. It was an Italian naval radio station that they took over. But the married people lived out in the town wherever they could rent houses. Life was very nice there. We had an APO, a commissary, officers' club, sergeants' club, enlisted men's club. It was a very nice post. If anyone fouled up, they got sent home as punishment! Politically, the thing was difficult, because everybody, including the major powers, had their own view of what should happen. We and the British favoured the partition of Eritrea when the Moslem northern part of the country where the people were largely nomadic in any case going to the Sudan. Most of the tribes spent part of their year in the Sudan and then moved back into Eritrea during the wet season. The Italians favoured receiving it back as a trust territory. In the case of Somalia, they received their old colony back in the form of a trust territory. They favoured that for Eritrea. The Soviets favoured a trust territory directly administered by the United Nations, by the Secretary General. Such a thing never happened. We gave up the idea. Ethiopia wanted to annex the whole thing as a province, as its new province. The population was divided about evenly, maybe slightly more, maybe 52% or 53% were Coptic Christians, who spoke Tigrinya, the language of the people in the nearby providence of Tigre in Ethiopia. 

The northern Moslems spoke a language called Tigre, but they also spoke five other languages, mutually unintelligible one to the other, for the most part. They were Semitic languages in the northern half of the territory. Along the coast there were islands of barely related Hamitic languages. But they spoke Arabic among themselves, fairly good quality of Arabic, as a lingua  franca.  

While I was there, I learned Italian, which I needed every day. Everybody needed Italian. That was the real lingua franca  of the country. After I had a good grip on that, I went on to Arabic. It was the colloquial Arabic of the Red Sea area and a very useful form of Arabic, close to the classical. Those two languages would get you just about all over the country and nearby parts of Ethiopia. There was a great deal of Italian still spoken in Ethiopia in those days.

My record shows an assignment at Addis Ababa. Quite true. I had to be assigned someplace until I had a consulate open in Asmara, so I was attached to the embassy at Addis Ababa, where I spent a couple of weeks in early February of 1950 and where I called on the emperor in top hat and morning clothes, borrowed; I didn't own those myself. Ambassador George Merrill (and later Rives Childs) at Addis Ababa and their staff were very generous in their support most of the time that I was in Asmara running it as a two-man post with one Foreign Service female clerk in carrying the administrative load for me. 

 Q: How did it work? Were you under our embassy in Addis Ababa?

 MULCAHY: Until Eritrea was federated with Ethiopia on the 15th of September 1952, Asmara was an entirely independent consulate and I reported directly to the Department of State.

 Q: How did the embassy in Addis Ababa feel about Eritrea?  

MULCAHY: They were quite loyal. They used to have people over there from time to time and they had been doing what reporting there was on Eritrea available in the Department's files. But I think they were probably sympathetic to the emperor’s view that there ought to be a connection with Ethiopia. I think also they thought it would be a leavening and possibly a good example for Ethiopia to deal with a democratically elected, autonomous, internally autonomous, Eritrea. I, frankly, thought that, too. I firmly believed that that would have been exactly the best thing for Ethiopia and that the empire, which it indeed is, could thrive if run as a series of autonomous regions under a federal constitution, for example.  

Q: Did you feel that you had any role in developing any policy towards this? The federation came. Did it come without our pushing or pulling or objections? 

MULCAHY: I had regular consultations with the United Nations High Commissioner who eventually was sent out there, Don Eduardo Anze Matienzo, a distinguished former foreign minister of Bolivia, a very fine, erudite, cultured gentleman. Anze Matienzo was a good friend. We had a good personal relationship. I also had a close relationship with his Principal Secretary who was an Austrian, an old employee of the League of Nations, Ranshoven-Wertheimer, and with all the key members of his staff whom I saw frequently. Asmara was a city of only all told 50,000 or 60,000 people, about 15,000 Italians and 1,200 British, I suppose, counting dependents, and not counting a 2,000- man British battalions and a very, very small American community. We had a few American missionaries there besides that, three missionary establishments. 

We had a very close-knit community and good relations among the different communities both internationally and ethnically. I was always being approached by the leaders of 16 different political factions when I went there. Some of them amalgamated with others after December 1950 when the General Assembly decreed in favour of federation of Eritrea with Ethiopia. They went down to about eight. To round up a good cross-section of Eritrean opinion on any subject, I would take my time over a three-day period to seek out the eight leaders of these factions. Sometimes I wouldn't need to go to all eight of them, but maybe five or six of them and have a chat with them. You could do that by sitting at a certain coffee shop near the cathedral on the main street in Asmara. If you were there, many people would see you and they'd want to get their word in with you or they'd come around to the Consulate to deliver their points of view. 

Q: You did find yourself sort of captured by the American military community or by the British military community or by the Italian community. 

MULCAHY: No, definitely not.

Q: How were relations with what we would call--I don't want to use the pejorative sense--the natives, the actual Eritreans? 

MULCAHY: Very, very good. The Coptic Eritreans who were in the majority in the highlands around Asmara had favoured outright annexation by Ethiopia. They were supporting what was called a shifta  army, several guerrilla bands, always much less numerous than you'd ever believe. They were indistinguishable from the Tigrinya-speaking Ethiopian citizens who came in from across the border. But most of the Eritrean nobility--and they continued even under the Italians to have their stratification of society into azmatches, dejazmatches, caghazmatches, etc. similar to counts, earls, barons, dukes and what have you, old Ethiopian titles. A lot of them fielded little guerrilla bands of their own in order to show their loyalty to the Emperor. In the northern Moslem areas there were also guerrilla bands, who tended to favor a partition of Eritrea. They wanted to go with the Sudan with which they identified ethnically and religiously. That was their outlook. Now, the Moslems were divided in the country as a whole. Most of them in the cities and coastal areas favoured the status of republic. But after the General Assembly voted in favour of federation and we and the British supported it when we saw that partition was a non-starter. After India, after Cyprus, after Palestine you couldn't talk partitions. 

Q: After seeing the fighting that took place and the animosity, we just were not inclined to support partitions. 

MULCAHY: That's right. Everybody came around, to believe that, if this federation concept could be well and fairly hammered out, it would be a good thing. In my office staff, I had an Italian who had been an active member of a party that favoured an Eritrean republic. He had been a former member of the Italian Colonial Service but had resigned in 1938, resigned from the Fascist party, resigned his reserve commission in the army. I wouldn't call him a great democrat, but philosophically he was rooted there. He'd been there for almost 30 years and spoke flawless Arabic, was often consulted by the Mufti and the Qadi of Asmara on fine points in Koranic law, and used to lecture to the Moslem law students. I got him a job teaching Arabic at the little University of Maryland extension program we had at Asmara, which is where I also learned Arabic. I learned my Italian from him, largely on the job. I had him, a Christian Eritrean, a Moslem Eritrean, and an Armenian female. The Armenian Community were quite influential in Ethiopia and Eritrea. Social relations among the communities were really quite good in Eritrea. I divided my time pretty equally between the British, the United Nations and the Italian communities. The Moslem and Christian communities were not very much engaged in social affairs by our standards-cocktail parties and dinner parties--but they were continually inviting you to their weddings, to he mosque for feast days, to the Coptic cathedral for all their feast days. You were very often in touch with them. I also visited the political leaders when I went traveling, which I did a great deal of. A lot of visiting I tied in with hunting trips. Hunting was fabulous there because the British had taken guns away from all the Italians and didn't even let them have shotguns. There had been something like nine years of uninhibited growth of the wildlife population there. For birds and for four-legged animals it was a paradise for hunters. 

Q: Was the continuation of our communications base in Asmara a major imperative as far as how we wanted to see Eritrea go? 

MULCAHY: Whatever way Eritrea went, we wanted to be able to maintain the communications base there. At that time that little base was handling all of our military and diplomatic correspondence from the Middle East and nearby parts of Africa and boosting it to Washington-to a base near Washington, shall we say. I don't know whether that's still classified, so we'll just say near Washington--by high-speed telex so that it sounded like just a screech and was almost un-monitorable. I gather it was monitorable at the receiving end but it would be considered fairly primitive by today's methods. All diplomatic and military communications went there from a large part of the world. The beauty of Asmara at the edge of the Ethiopian plateau with sheer cliffs all around was that it had almost trouble-free radio communications except in times of sunspots. No black-outs or two days of black-outs, say, in the normal year where Frankfurt and Manila, the other comparable bases in the world, and Panama, were blacked out for as long as a month during the whole year. Often Asmara would get all of the traffic of Europe to relay to Washington.  

Q: Did this have any effect on how we voted for federation?

 MULCAHY: Yes, but I think we had no agreement. I wasn't aware of any even secret understanding that the Ethiopians would allow the base to stay there. The agreement on our remaining there and on the whole subject of military relations with Eritrea--the final agreement and the initialling of the papers--took place in my living room in Asmara in September 1952 between Akilu Habte Wold, the Foreign Minister, and our then-ambassador to Ethiopia, J. Rives Childs. To make a long story short, 25 years later, when it expired I was Acting Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs in Washington and drafted the notification to the Ethiopians that we didn't intend to renew it.

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EDWARD W. CLARK Consular Officer Asmara (1953-1956)  

Edward W. Clark was born in New York and graduated from Princeton University and Cornell Law School. His postings abroad have included Panama, Asmara, Lima, and Buenos Aires. Mr. Clark was interviewed by Charles Stuart Kennedy in 1992. 

Q: Then you got yourself out of Central America for a while and went to Asmara from 1953-56. What were you doing there?  

CLARK: I was consul there. 

Q: What was the situation at that time in Eritrea?

 CLARK: Eritrea had just been federated with the Empire of Ethiopia by the United Nations. The British had just left. It was then turned over to a local Eritrean government but federated with the Ethiopian Empire. The Ethiopians had customs, immigration, defense and foreign affairs. The other things like garbage collection and local police and fire departments were part of the Eritrean government responsibility.

 Q: How did the Eritreans feel about this situation at that time?  

CLARK: One of my jobs was to keep track of how this federation was proceeding, whether it was being respected by the Ethiopians. The Eritreans and the Ethiopians had always been at odds. The Ethiopians over the centuries would every once in a while, come down and beat up on the Eritreans and take back a bunch of their wives and make them pay them tribute and then they would go back. This went on for centuries. They didn't like each other. And the Eritreans had obviously good reasons for not liking the Ethiopians.

 The Italians, of course, had been in Eritrea for some 40-50 years. They had a great influence on the Eritreans. They built a lot of roads, good schools. The Eritreans in many ways were better off and better educated than the Ethiopians. It was obvious to everybody, I think, including the United Nations that this was not going to last. This was just the papering over of a problem in order to let the United Nations get out of there. So the three years I was there you could see the gradual diminishing of this structure. The Ethiopians were gradual about it but obviously they were going to... Well, we reported that but there wasn't much we could do. Our big interest there was the American military.

Q: Kagnew Station. Had Kagnew been established by that time?

CLARK: Kagnew Station was originally an Italian naval communications centre. When the British took over from the Italians in 1942, they gave us that naval station, and we used it as a naval station at first. Then it expanded pretty quickly and was used as a station that could monitor nuclear explosions in the Soviet Union plus, because of its location, it was a good relay station for the military system across the world.

So by the time I got there, about 11 years later, it was a substantial station run by the Army with a smaller naval communications unit. It was our major interest and our major problem because there were some 2,000 people there and they were getting into trouble. We had the usual PXs there and people would buy there and sell outside and the merchants would complain, etc. They had the need for expansion and during the time I was there, there was negotiated a new agreement which provided for a new facility to house all the stations plus some receiving and sending antenna fields. Interestingly that was all negotiated in Asmara instead of Ethiopia, so that we, the American consul and the Commander of the post there were very, very much involved in the negotiations. It was very interesting. I know of no other time when an agreement like that was negotiated. 

Q: With whom were you negotiating with? 

CLARK: We were negotiating with the local Ethiopian Federal Government. The emperor’s representative there in Asmara. The details were all worked out over a period of a year. When that was finally agreed to then we all went up to Addis and with the Ethiopian Government and the Embassy finally signed the agreement. 

Q: The Ambassador in Addis Ababa was Joseph Simonson who was not a career officer. How did he operate? 

CLARK: He was a minister of the church in Minneapolis and a Republican supporter. I think he had said the prayers at several Republican conventions. He really didn't know what he was doing. 

Q: That was probably one reason why the negotiations were held at Asmara. 

CLARK: No, I think it was because the details couldn't have been negotiated without being in Asmara and actually going out to the sites, etc. He was not involved in it. He was unfortunate. Remember Nixon made a trip around Africa as Vice President? 

Q: Yes, I interviewed somebody not long ago who accompanied him on that trip, Jules Walker.

 CLARK: When Nixon came back from that he said that there was one meatball ambassador that has to go, and that was Simonson as it turned out. A terrible thing to say but... 

Q: But from what I gather he wasn't doing anything. 

CLARK: No, he was unfortunate. He was a nice guy but shouldn't have been in that position. There are lots of other ambassadors I know, political and otherwise, who shouldn't have been there either. 

Q: Did this affect your work at all or was he over the hill and far away? 

CLARK: We were able to report directly to Washington. I would send copies to the Embassy but they didn't have to go to the Embassy. So we were fairly independent. We handled all their mail for them because it came in through the APO. The military would turn it over to us and we would put the Embassy mail on the local Ethiopian airline planes. They were always calling us asking for their mail. At one point they accused us of holding it up, if you can imagine that, for Christmas.

 Q: What was the impression you were getting from those in Eritrea of Haile Selassie in those days? 

CLARK: The Eritrean people didn't like the Ethiopians so they didn't like the Emperor. He came there several times while I was there. They had a big reception up at the Emperor's representative's palace. But he didn't spend much time down there. But no, Eritrean people didn't like the Ethiopians, period. And they still don't.

 Q: Now they are at least quasi independent, but I am not sure...Were there any other nationalities there that had any influence in that area? 

CLARK: The Italians did. The Ethiopian policy towards the Italians was very well thought out. They advised their people to treat them properly. They wanted them to stay because they were the ones who could build the roads, fix the electricity, do all the things that the Ethiopians didn't know how to do to keep things going. So there was a substantial populous of Italians of that level there. Plus some fairly well-to-do Italians. They had the beer plant there, a textile plant, they had a large dairy producing farm and a number of other things. So the Italians were very much in the ballpark there, very influential. I would say that the Italian Consul General was much more influential than any of us were at the time. Apart from that, no...

 Q: No Soviet representation? 

CLARK: No, no Soviets. 

Q: Israeli?  

CLARK: Well, the Israelis had a kosher meat packing plant there. Eritrea became a central place for produce for ARAMCO. They had an agent there who bought and they would send a plane over once or twice a week to take fresh produce back. 

Q: I was in Dhahran from 1958-60 and I ate that food. 

CLARK: They used to come over and take their R&R there too. 

Q: Did you ever do that? : No, I never got over.

 SOURCE: Interviews with US Diplomatic Officers Who Served in Ethiopia 1947 - 2002 https://www.mediafire.com/file/xrdbbp6tkxoimao/Interviews+with+US+officials+who+served+in+Ethiopi++Country+Reader+1947-2001.pdf/file

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Thanks to Ahmed Robleh for sharing