Agreement Between the Coordination Body of the Democratic Civil Forces (Taqaddum) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) January 2, 2024
A digital archive on Eritrea and Ethiopia in particular and on the Horn of Africa, in general
Tuesday 5 March 2024
Friday 1 March 2024
Interviews With US Diplomats Who Served in Eritrea 1950 - 2002
Interviews With US Diplomats Who Served in Eritrea 1950 - 2002 about what they did and their impressions about the country
Excerpts
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.
==================================================================================
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.
JOHN PROPST BLANE, Consular Officer Asmara (1957-1960).
This is what he said when he saw the Ethiopian government dismantling the
federation piece by piece,
“I will say that Eritrea is the only place in my whole
career where I became emotionally involved with the local politics. I was, in
my heart of hearts, as fervent an Eritrean nationalist as existed. My little
friends were being done wrong and I didn't like it.”
“ I don't know, why but they
were nice people, you could see them being mashed, they were unhappy--it was
inevitable. I hoped that it didn't color our reporting too badly. I
recognized the syndrome and tried to compensate for it, but nevertheless the
feeling was there..”
Charles E. Rushing 1960
One interesting thing was that practically all of the
message traffic during the Korean War, went from Washington to Asmara through
the Kagnew Station and then from Asmara to Korea. Eritrea was a very good place
to have for this purpose. The installation and the city were high, at 8,000
feet, and not too far from the equator, where propagation was particularly
favorable.
Asmara was a beautiful city. It looked like something out of
the movies. It had sidewalk cafes and a beautiful cathedral, excellent
restaurants, there was a golf course, there were outdoor swimming pools. But it
got so cold at night that the pool at the consulate would only get up to about
65 during the day and that was cold.
I was the deputy principal officer, although I'm not sure
that that description existed in those days. I was number two, and there was
also a consular/administrative officer, a CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] guy
and his secretary, a USIA, and an AID [Agency for International Development]
officer. There was also a State secretary.
I met and married an Italian young woman who had been born
in Asmara, as had her parents. Her grandparents were among those who came to
Eritrea in the early 1900s from Sicily and Puglia. She was working for Aden
Airways, which folded a long time ago. It was a part of the overseas operation
of BOAC [British Overseas Airways Corporation]. She and I met at the airport
when I was meeting the courier.
I was duty officer which meant I had to be available 24 hours a day each
week-end, every third week. One of the great things about Asmara was that you
could hear the airplanes coming in to land from anywhere in town and you could
beat them to the airport. So, it was never a question of having to call up and
say, "Is it on time?" I was playing tennis and I heard the airplane,
so I got into the car in grimy, smelly tennis clothes and drove out to the
airport to meet the courier. Asmara was a big courier station. From Asmara,
couriers would go to Aden and Khartoum before stopping at Addis and farther
south and ending up in South Africa. Besides the courier, there was this lovely
woman there.
SAMUEL R.
GAMMON, III Consul General Asmara (1964-1967)
At that time the still-ongoing, Eritrean independence
movement was just getting under way, it really kicked on in late '60-'61,
political banditry and guerrilla operations against the Imperial government. We
obviously stood to gain by being as neutral as possible in that situation
because if there's anything more vulnerable than an antenna garden of say 250,
40 to 80 foot antenna towers held up by guy-wires, to a guerrilla operation, it
would be hard to find. The government was always trying to involve the US
military as supporting the regime of Haile Selassie and the establishment. That
was mostly the most sensitive thing--trying to keep the military at a lower
profile.
At one point, there was a lengthy negotiation which I did as
an addendum to the treaty establishing Kagnew. I say addendum because it was
not a formal treaty instrument. We did an agreed interpretation and
modification of the treaty of 1953 between the United States and Ethiopia under
which Kagnew Station existed. I found, and the embassy agreed, that we could
make considerable concessions in the direction of doffing our hat to Ethiopian
sovereignty. Such things, for example, as changing the license plates at Kagnew
station to make them Ethiopian license plates, with a nominal fee to cover the
cost of manufacture, but no profit. Flying the Ethiopian flag at various places
on post. Little things like that.
: What was our policy towards the Eritrean separatists?
Did you have any contact with them?
GAMMON: I had a lot of contact with them. We also had a
mapping mission going, we had Air Force, Army and Navy present at Kagnew
Station. The Air Force was basically cooperating with the Ethiopians in doing
photo mapping of all Ethiopia. On one occasion, near the end of my stay, a US
helicopter with an Ethiopian interpreter and two US Air Force types, had a
little engine trouble and plumped down into the midst of a group of shifta.
Q: Shifta being?
GAMMON: The political bandit, Eritrean Liberation Front guerrillas. Who
promptly burned the helicopter and took them prisoner. There were flying around
landing to ask local names for geographic, "What do you call that
mountain? What's that stream?" so they could put names on the maps they
were constructing. We had terrific communications of course at Kagnew, much
better than the embassy did in Addis.
I got in a quick piece saying not to worry they would be
released fairly soon because we were on polite terms with the political
opposition, the ELF. I had pretty good contacts which I dusted off. Of
course, the US military and the Ethiopian military went into a swivet at one
point, CINCSTRIKE sent out a planning message for a US parachute regiment to
drop into Eritrea. It was a planning message only and obviously would not take
place. When a copy of that reached the embassy they went into almost terminal
panic!
It took two weeks
before the three prisoners could be released because there was so much air
patrolling and hunting for them. They were walked by night over to the Sudanese
boundary and released.
Q: How did you maintain contact? In so many situations
where you have a guerrilla force, we are under strict instructions you just
don't talk to the opposition which is usually a bad mistake.
GAMMON: You talk as much as you can. The instructions
usually come from the existing government and if you can get away with it you
do. One of the leading types that I knew perfectly well and had contact with
was one of the guys who had helped Haile Selassie take over Eritrea.
Yet, I knew Senator Tedla Bairo well; we had been in
social contact, and he was also in touch with the Ethiopian government. It was
a slightly murky situation. I was very confident that the captives would be
sprung and they were. The main thing was to keep us from diving totally
into bed with the Ethiopian government's clumsy efforts to recover them by
force. They were in due time released. The MAAG brigadier was up and MAAG was
all over the place advising the Ethiopian Army which was blundering around
hunting. I would say that probably the best reporting thing I did was the
last message I sent before leaving Asmara after three and a half years, where I
forecast that we knew that the emperor was elderly, we knew that he would be
succeeded in time by a military regime and I predicted that Kagnew Station
probably had, with luck, five or six good years left and then possibly five to
six bad years before we'd be tossed out entirely. I left in '67, I think we
were out in '74 or '75, something like that. I was not far off on that
forecast.
Q: Did you find, from your point of view, that having a
base like Kagnew Station began to be the tail that wagged the dog?
GAMMON: Not so much in my time or in Korry's time
because then the embassy was upgraded from a Class III to a Class II mission in
that period. I would say that the dominant foreign policy was that Ethiopia is
a strong, stable and important country that can be a major asset to US foreign
policy. Kagnew was then probably our most important in-country objective along
with growth and stability and MAAG (Military Assistance Advisory Group)
improvement to the Ethiopian military.
Korry was sharp enough to design something which we
jokingly called the village team in Asmara, which was a model of the country
team. The village team consisted of a MAAG representative, a couple of AID
nurses who were attached to the nursing school at the local hospital, the USIS
PAO, obviously the CIA station man, and the commanding officer of Kagnew
station who came to my weekly staff meeting. This, we referred to, as the
village team, which was equivalent to the country team in Addis. We were
very closely tied in with embassy operation
Also thanks to the
capabilities of Kagnew Station in the ELINT area.
Q: That's Electronic Intelligence?
GAMMON: I had vast access to ELINT material relating to the
entire Horn of Africa and southern Arabia, which I would peruse, and then I
would do a weekly summation of things. I would type it myself and send it in a
single copy up to the ambassador via the weekly courier, every Thursday
morning. So that he was then plugged in, without having to wait for this
material to get back to Washington, to the intelligence community to digest and
disgorge in much briefer and more sanitized form. That worked fairly well as a
feed-in to the ambassador.
Arthur Hummel Ambassador 75 - 76
One of the unlovely things about Ethiopian society was the
way in which they looked down on and really discriminated against people with
darker skin than they had and African features. This attitude was terribly hard
on the foreign diplomatic community there. Ethiopians are very bright and
lively people, and they were only half joking when they say that there are
three kinds of people in Africa: there are the blacks, the pinks, and the
whites. The blacks are the Bantus to the south, the West Africans, and those
people who have Negroid facial features. They say, "You Westerners are the
'pinks.' We Ethiopians are the 'whites.'" I always enjoyed that. That
comment went around as a "bon mot" every time the matter was
mentioned. They were only half joking about their superiority. The wives of the
West and southern African diplomats and their staffs who had to go to the
markets to do the shopping were really despised and treated abominably by the
Amhara shopkeepers. It was a kind of racial discrimination that was very
difficult for them.
The Full Report can be downloaded at this link:
Thanks to Ahmed Robleh for sharing