I Didn't Do It for You

by Michela Wrong

  It was a need that handed Haile Selassie a priceless bargaining tool. Washington, the Emperor was to discover, was ready to jump through a great many hoops to guarantee unhampered use of Kagnew. For more than two decades, Washington’s approach to Ethiopia would be essentially that conveyed to an ambassador-to-be during his Pentagon briefing in 1963. Told that Ethiopia’s poorly-trained army was trashing most of the American military equipment delivered to it, Edward Korry asked the Pentagon officer how the US was planning to tackle the problem. The reply was cynically revealing. ‘He said there wasn’t much we could do with the Ethiopians, and it was really Kagnew rent money, and if the Emperor wanted it in “solid gold Cadillacs”, that was his term, he could have it that way.’5

  The Emperor was to play the Kagnew card repeatedly, using US interest in the spy station to achieve several long-held ambitions. Incorporating Eritrea was only part of his master plan for Ethiopia. The time had come for his antiquated empire to make a great leap forward, and it was not something, he knew, it could do on its own.

  Well into the 20th century, Ethiopia still went to war in medieval style: rases toured their provinces, enlisting fighters with promises of plunder, pulling together travelling armies which dissolved as soon as the campaign was over or when crops needed harvesting. Their motley forces provided Western journalists with picturesque photo spreads for audiences back home. But these were private armies, loyal to individuals rather than any state, and the fighters–barefoot and equipped with ancient rifles–were only as dependable as the rases themselves. By the time Evelyn Waugh was covering the 1935 Italian campaign, Ethiopia’s military was beginning to seem an absurd anachronism. For Waugh, whose sympathies tended towards Rome, the pageantry had a pantomime quality, a touch of the pathetic. ‘They had head-dresses and capes of lion skin, circular shields and extravagantly long, curved swords, decorated with metal and coloured stuff; their saddles and harness were brilliant and elaborate. Examined in detail, of course, the ornaments were of wretched quality, the work of Levantine craftsmen in the Addis bazaar, new, aiming only at maximum ostentation for a minimum price,’ he noted.6

  The trouncing the Ethiopians suffered at Mussolini’s hands underlined the lesson. If Ethiopia was to prevent its territory being nibbled away by greedy outsiders and bind its diverse ethnic groups together to form a centralized empire under Amhara rule, it must modernize. It must have a standing army, run by professionals trained in elite military academies and equipped with state-of-the-art weaponry Ethiopia itself could neither manufacture nor afford to buy.

  It was only natural that the Emperor should look to the US for that help. Unlike London and Paris, Washington never formally recognized Italy’s occupation of Ethiopia, a gesture of solidarity he was not likely to forget. While Britain had pillaged Ethiopia’s industrial infrastructure, the Americans generously provided arms and ammunition under their Lend-Lease Act. Given the choice between the tired Old World and a fresh-faced, brash New World, Haile Selassie knew which patron he preferred.

  He made his choice clear on February 12, 1945. Robert Howe, the British Minister in Addis, woke in a flurry of alarm at 5.00 am, having just heard a US Air Force DC-3 taking off. It was carrying Haile Selassie to take tea with President FD Roosevelt on a US cruiser in the Suez Canal, as explicit a gesture of American interest in Ethiopia as it was possible to imagine. The British were left to play catch-up, with Howe chartering a tiny biplane that reached Egypt in a tiresome series of short hops, while Winston Churchill was abruptly rerouted to Cairo to meet an African leader suddenly judged a cause for concern. The undignified scramble achieved little. When a British aide asked the Emperor what points he wished to discuss with the Prime Minister, his reply was curt. ‘None.’7

  As the British withdrew from the Horn, Haile Selassie and Washington plotted what was to be a very pragmatic marriage of convenience. Washington was uneasy with the idea of an independent Eritrea, all too likely, it was thought, to fall prey to a predatory Communist bloc. It wanted a friendly Ethiopian government, a government it could do business with, in firm control of the Hamasien plateau. Even before the UN General Assembly had opted for Eritrean federation as a compromise solution in December 1950, Washington had signalled its interest in reaching a base rights agreement with the Emperor.8 Addressing the UN Security Council that year, John Foster Dulles, President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, made no attempt to conceal his government’s self-interested take on Eritrea’s future. ‘From the point of view of justice, the opinions of the Eritrean people must receive consideration,’ he acknowledged. ‘Nevertheless the strategic interest of the United States in the Red Sea basin and considerations of security and world peace make it necessary that the country has to be linked to our ally, Ethiopia.’9

  It was an extraordinarily frank admission to make. Essentially, Dulles was recognizing the moral dubiousness of imposing a federation no one wanted on the Eritrean population. But it would happen anyway, because it suited US needs.

  The Kagnew factor casts a new light on American diplomatic behaviour during the interminable debate over Eritrea’s future that raged during the 1940s and 1950s. Remove Kagnew from the equation and the support the US gave Ethiopia in its campaign for union can be presented as an admirable rejection of colonial lèse-majesté, a high-minded championing of a struggling African nation. Add Kagnew to the mix and the US stance looks rather less noble. Haile Selassie himself was in no doubt as to the pivotal role Washington had played in nipping Eritrean leanings towards independence in the bud. ‘If, today, the brother territory Eritrea stands finally united under the Crown and if Ethiopia has regained her shorelines on the Red Sea, it has been due, in no small measure, to the contribution of the United States,’ he told Congress in May 1954. No wonder the UN, sensitive to the wishes of its most important member, refused to get involved when the Federation was abrogated eight years later.

  Had the spy station been the sole card up the Emperor’s sleeve, his leverage might have remained limited. But Haile Selassie knew how to make himself valuable on many fronts. As the years went by, ‘Kagnew’ would become a convenient mental tag for American policymakers in the know, shorthand for a complex mesh of interests binding the US to Ethiopia.

  One of the Emperor’s masterstrokes was to volunteer 1,000 Ethiopian troops for the war in Korea. At a time when the Soviet Union was denouncing the UN military operation as a neo-colonial adventure, the announcement that Africa’s oldest independent state was joining in on the West’s side, black faces fighting for freedom alongside white, presented the US with a glorious propaganda coup. When the US and Ethiopia signed a 25-year rights agreement on the Asmara base in May 1953–a deal whose terms were negotiated by Aklilou and Spencer–the spy station, tellingly, was christened after the elite Kagnew battalion Haile Selassie dispatched to Korea.

  The Korea episode underlined a wider truth. Positioned on one of the world’s key waterways, close to the oil-rich nations on which Western prosperity depended and to the bubbling political cauldron of the Middle East, Ethiopia, America’s policymakers came to believe, could either bring further chaos to a volatile region or act as a stabilizing anchor. As a Christian ruler hemmed in by Moslem regimes, the Emperor was clearly a natural Western ally. His defiance of Italian Fascism meant he enjoyed enormous kudos in the developing world. Here was a man who could play the role of wise elderly statesman, mediating between the West and the inexperienced politicians emerging to lead Africa’s former colonies, a seasoned moderator who could swing delegates’ votes in America’s favour within international organizations like the UN.

  This was not quite as nebulous a role as it sounds. In the post-war years, a vibrant debate raged on the nature of nationhood in Africa, whose territory had been clumsily hacked into states by 19th-century colonial powers indifferent to ethnic realities on the ground. Left-wing thinkers like Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, regarded in the West as a dangerous radical, called for the creation of a United States of Africa. Haile Selassie
, in contrast, was anxious to preserve existing frontiers, however clumsily drawn. His conservative school of thought won the day when the Organization of African Unity (OAU), initially largely funded by the Emperor, was set up in Addis in 1963. ‘The Emperor’s signal biggest contribution to African history is the creation of the OAU in Addis and the drafting of an OAU charter,’ says Chester Crocker, former Assistant Secretary of State for Africa. ‘There was to be no messing with inherited boundaries. The Latin doctrine of uti possedetis (‘boundaries shall stay as they are’) was very Ethiopian in its conception. But it also served the conservative interests of a number of other African leaders who were desperately insecure about how they were going to keep the new states together.’10

  While endorsing a principle that set colonial boundaries in stone, African delegates in Addis chose to turn a blind eye to the most blatant charter violation of all, committed embarrassingly close to home. The border Italy had drawn around Eritrea at the turn of the century had been erased by the very nation championing the principle of frontier inviolability. This act of hypocrisy would not be lost on the EPLF, which would come to regard the OAU with utter contempt during the long years of exile. As far as the Americans were concerned, however, Haile Selassie had delivered once again, shoring up a fragile continent.

  Israel, a fledgling state whose survival was a key concern to the US, with its influential Jewish lobby, provided another rationale for American support. Israeli aircraft could only access the African hinterland by flying over the Horn. Given Moslem hostility to the Jewish state, Ethiopia, a country whose foundation myth elided with Israel’s own, was the natural spot for El Al aircraft to refuel as they worked their way down the African coast to Johannesburg.

  Airspace was not the only issue. Strategists urging Washington in the 1960s and 1970s to increase its military aid to Ethiopia sketched out a doomsday scenario in which, left to its own devices, the Addis government lost control of Eritrea to Moslem insurgents, who promptly joined the Arab camp and cut off Israel’s shipping lifeline through the Red Sea. It was a farfetched sequence of events which sidestepped the obvious fact that Arab states were already, without Eritrean participation, perfectly placed to mount such a blockade, but were generally more interested in increasing trade with the West than mounting ideological embargoes.11 Yet the Israel-as-hostage scenario was still being bandied around to justify support for Addis in the mid-1970s, when it had become clear that a Christian-dominated rebel movement–the EPLF–had seized the initiative from the Moslem ELF in Eritrea, removing a key element in this imaginary equation. Crocker still defends it. ‘How could the Israelis, given the sense of total isolation they often feel, be sure that some Arab coalition wouldn’t shut off access to the Red Sea?’ he argues. ‘It might be a worst case scenario, but that’s what strategic planners cater for. After all, Nasser did shut down the Suez Canal. “Never again”, was the feeling.’12

  None of these considerations would have carried much weight, of course, had it not been for the little matter of the Soviet Union, the looming threat that formed the backdrop to all strategic thinking at the time. In the 1950s, Secretary of State Dulles had dreamt up the concept of a Northern Tier of anti-Communist states that would serve as a bulwark against Communist expansionism. Why not create a Southern Tier of loyal allies in the Middle East, a secondary line of defence that would keep Communism out of the area and guarantee Western access to the oil-rich Persian Gulf? Haile Selassie adroitly volunteered Ethiopia for the role. ‘That type of argument made it possible for the secretaries of state and defence to “find” that the defence of Ethiopia was essential to the defence of the free world,’ John Spencer recalled in his memoirs.

  Woven together, the various factors combined to form a conviction in Washington–as deep-rooted as it was amorphous–that Ethiopia and its increasingly restless northern province somehow ‘mattered’ to the US. American thinking on the Horn could be summarized as what one sceptical expert astutely labelled ‘the geometer’s approach to strategy’.13 Take a compass, stick a point in the country under consideration and draw progressively larger concentric circles. Slapping your hand to your head, you then exclaim: ‘My God, this country’s so close to Israel, to the Gulf, to the entire Middle East. It must be important!’

  If the approach was premised on implausibilities and questionable assumptions, that was hardly unique to Ethiopia. The same logic would be applied around the globe during the Cold War era on similarly specious grounds and with equally damaging results–remember how Vietnam’s political future was deemed of vital American interest? For the geometer’s approach has a lethal characteristic: it tends to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. By ruling that a backward African nation with few natural resources, far from obvious US zones of interest, was in fact a key ally, Washington helped ensure Moscow reached a parallel conclusion, first in neighbouring Somalia–desperate to match Ethiopia in its military build-up brigade for brigade–and then, when the opportunity presented itself, in Ethiopia itself. A nation’s significance, like a diamond’s value, lies purely in the eye of the beholder. By deciding the Horn mattered to the West, Washington guaranteed that the region became important to the East, sentencing it to disastrous superpower interference for decades to come.

  Haile Selassie had succeeded in establishing the principle of Ethiopia’s usefulness, but the price charged for Kagnew was to be the object of heated discussion.

  Under the 1953 base rights agreement, in which Washington was granted near-sovereign rights over the various ‘tracts’, the US agreed to build up Ethiopia’s army, providing training and equipment for three divisions of 6,000 men–a deal worth $5m. But this, in the Emperor’s eyes, only marked the beginning. He was aiming for an army of 40,000–a force, American military experts judged, totally out of proportion for a country facing at this stage of its history no significant external challenges. With its underdeveloped economy, they pointed out, Ethiopia would be unable to support an army of that size unaided. It would be better off with a lightly equipped mobile force that could be sent swiftly to crush uprisings in the provinces. ‘No encouragement should be given to expand or modernize the Ethiopian forces,’ the Pentagon advised.14

  Their argument made sense, but Haile Selassie steamed on regardless. Africa would rarely throw up another leader so skilled at getting what he wanted from what might be regarded a position of weakness. The years spent waiting for the throne to come his way, the humiliating exile in Bath, had taught the Emperor the value of patience. ‘A Shewan swallows years after he chews,’ runs an Amharic proverb. Having seen off both Mussolini and Churchill, Haile Selassie knew that persistence can be the politician’s most formidable weapon. Loudly demand an immediate answer, and the response risks being set in stone. Press quietly and relentlessly, and you will eventually get your way, for your opponent will grow weary of the debate.

  At every meeting with a US ambassador, during every trip to America, the Emperor’s ministers and diplomats would complain that their country was being neglected, its determination to support Washington in the global battle against Communism sorely undervalued. By allowing Kagnew Station to operate, they argued, Ethiopia was putting herself at enormous risk, laying herself open to the threat of punitive action by anti-Western Arab neighbours. The very least Washington could do, surely, was to give her loyal ally the weapons to defend herself and put down that pesky Eritrean insurgency. Out of their depth, American negotiators floundered and succumbed. ‘By the time our leaders were dealing with Haile Selassie, he’d been in that job for 15 years. Most of our people had been in their jobs for just 18 months,’ recalls Crocker.15

  Crocker, who was later to negotiate with Zairean dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, another supposed bastion in the fight against Communist infiltration, far preferred the Haile Selassie way of conducting business. ‘Every conversation with Mobutu was unpleasant because you were reminded of all the things you had not done for him. It was like buying an antique map on the banks of the Seine, a haggl
ing match, really down in the gutter. The Emperor had a more dignified way of doing things. He was very skilled.’ But, at heart, the two African leaders’ tactics were based on the same simple principle: Squeaky Wheel Syndrome. The potentially unreliable ally always wins more aid than the nation that falls neatly into step behind its chosen superpower. Like Mobutu, Haile Selassie immediately understood that the most effective method of grabbing Washington’s attention was to flirt with the enemy.

  The blackmail game followed an established routine. Faced with none-too-subtle hints from Ethiopia–Addis was disappointed, Addis was keeping its options open, Addis felt betrayed–a nervous American ambassador would fire off telegrams to Washington urging military spending in Ethiopia to be increased, fighter jets supplied, a navy established. The State Department would back the ambassador, only to find its way blocked by the Pentagon, which would point out that the US had more pressing commitments closer to home. The Emperor would then make a high-profile visit to the Eastern bloc, returning laden with promises of Communist funding. Another batch of anguished messages would fly across the Atlantic–which ambassador wanted, after all, to be remembered as the man who ‘lost’ Ethiopia?–and the order from a panicked Washington would go out: more military aid for Ethiopia.

  The manoeuvre worked superbly in 1959 when, angered by US support for the British notion of a Greater Somalia, Haile Selassie garnered $100m in credits during a visit to the Soviet Union. Appalled, Washington stepped up its military training programme in Ethiopia to cater for the desired 40,000-strong force. ‘Rent’ on Kagnew was now costing Washington $10–12m a year in military aid, in return for which a grateful Haile Selassie agreed to cede an additional 1,500 acres of land. No one would have guessed it from the peeved expressions on the faces of Ethiopian dignitaries arriving in Washington, but Ethiopia, soaking up to 60 per cent of US military aid to Africa, was the superpower’s biggest aid recipient on the continent.