by Glen Johnson
Vo explained the soldier had been twenty-four years old—not a teenager but, in fact, just two years younger than Kerry was at the time. He also specialized in firing the B-40 rocket launcher, but his weapon apparently jammed that day.
Vo didn’t claim his comrade’s death was a war crime. His casual demeanor suggested he accepted his killing as the possibility they all had faced in war.
It took a second for it to seep in.
The truth had been put to lies that had dogged John Kerry since he stood up to oppose the war in which he’d fought.
For someone who’d followed his career, I was witness to the moment fiction was displaced by fact, allegation and innuendo elbowed aside by reality.
I realized the magnitude of this revelation and clicked away with my camera, trying to preserve the scene for posterity.
As Kerry asked questions, Ben Wilkinson—who’d lived in Vietnam as a child—translated, an American uttering the words Vo Ban Tam rattled off in Vietnamese. Wilkinson’s lips were a portal to the past, and we all traveled back in time with each word he spoke.
When Kerry asked if he knew the soldier’s name, Vo said yes.
“Ba Thanh,” he said.
It was the moment the secretary learned the identity of the person he had killed.
Kerry later described the moment as “weird” and “a little surreal,” but he was cautious at accepting Vo’s story. It subsided with each successive question. He asked his former opponent about Ba Thanh. He asked about their unit’s tactics. He asked about the unit’s assessment of their opponents.
Despite the crowd surrounding them, it was two men in isolation, speaking soldier to soldier.
Vo Ban Tam said with a bit of bravado that he and his fellow Viet Cong could hear the throaty Swift Boats coming from three thousand feet away, more than enough time to take aim at their thin aluminum hulls.
He said the boats, which chugged more than sped along, often missed their targets with their own heavy-duty guns.
“We were guerrillas,” Vo said. “We were never where you were shooting.”
Kerry smiled at the comment. It may have been true, but there was at least once when his shot hit its mark.
The secretary chose not to contest the point, saying instead, “I’m glad we’re both alive.”
After chatting for just over ten minutes, the two shook with both of their hands. Kerry placed one of his commemorative secretary of State Challenge Coins in Vo’s palm.
He then turned and walked back to his motorcade for the drive to the airport and the start of his return flight. We gave him some space as our plane flew away from Vietnam for the last time.
The headlines the next day captured the juxtaposition of the moment, with The Washington Post’s putting it in sharpest relief.
It read: “Back on the Mekong Delta, John Kerry Meets a Man Who Once Tried to Kill Him and Finds Exoneration.”17
Veteran State Department correspondent Carol Morello, who’d accompanied us up the river and then listened to Vo Ban Tam, wrote: “Up until that moment, all Kerry knew was that he had shot a Viet Cong soldier. Suddenly, the soldier took shape as a man, with a name and a set of skills that he had used against Kerry and his crew.”18
Her report was picked up by The Boston Globe and printed for Kerry’s family, friends, neighbors, and longtime constituents to read back in his hometown.
His last trip to Vietnam as secretary of State had provided the final chapter in a life of public service beginning nearly fifty years earlier, with his first visit to the country as a Navy lieutenant.
John Kerry could go home again, his duty to his country—and himself—now complete.
Countries visited by the author, 1962–2012
Countries visited by the author, 2013–2017
1
HER NAME WAS
ANNE SMEDINGHOFF
JOHN KERRY HAD BEEN shot at in a war, had been vilified during a bitter campaign for president, and for nearly thirty years, had endured the indignities accompanying the privileges of politics.
None of that could ease the gut-wrenching moment he now faced.
“I need the room, please, folks,” he told his staff—one member sobbing—shortly after arriving at Andrews Air Force Base on April 6, 2013.19
The secretary of State and his traveling party were about to set off on their third trip together. It was an eleven-day, 23,000-mile, around-the-world journey that would take them to Turkey, Israel, the United Kingdom, the Republic of Korea, China, and Japan. They’d then make a refueling stop in Alaska before their final leg back to Washington, DC.
But first, Kerry sought the privacy of a conference room in the Distinguished Visitors Lounge for what he later said was “no more painful conversation in the world.”20
Hours earlier and on the opposite side of the globe, a suicide bomber had steered a car filled with explosives toward a group of American servicemen and diplomats in Afghanistan’s southern Zabul province. The group was in Qalat to drop off books at a local school.
The vehicle-borne IED killed three American soldiers, an Afghan interpreter, and a twenty-five-year-old State Department Foreign Service officer named Anne Smedinghoff.
Another FSO named Kelly Hunt was seriously wounded, along with an Afghan who worked for the US embassy in Kabul, Abbas Kamwand.
Now Kerry had to make a call to the Chicago suburb of River Forest, Illinois. It was his duty to tell Tom and Mary Beth Smedinghoff their daughter, the second of their four children, had died serving her country.
Smedinghoff was the first diplomat killed in the line of duty since US ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens. He and three others died on September 11, 2012, during an attack on a US diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya.
As the secretary sat alone in the conference room, speaking over the telephone to the Smedinghoffs, the veteran Foreign Service officer who’d been crying—despite not knowing Anne Smedinghoff personally—explained why her eyes were red and tears trickled down her cheeks.
“It could have been any one of us,” she said.21
In this instance, the claim wasn’t melodramatic: less than two weeks earlier, Kerry had visited Kabul for meetings with Afghan president Hamid Karzai, US ambassador James Cunningham, and Marine Corps General Joseph F. Dunford Jr., who commanded the international military mission in Afghanistan.
A young woman had been chosen by embassy officials to escort Kerry to his meetings, a plum job known as control officer. The honor and responsibility, a sign of an employee on the rise, had been given to a diplomat named Anne Smedinghoff.
With her Ray-Ban Aviators on her nose and trademark scarf around her neck, Smedinghoff was captured in a photograph as she walked behind Kerry after a job fair with female Afghan entrepreneurs. The event would endure as one of the secretary’s favorites during his four years in office.
Now, eleven days later, Anne Smedinghoff was dead.
Following his call to her parents and an overnight flight to Turkey, the secretary expressed his feelings during a news conference in Istanbul.
“I want to emphasize that Anne was everything that is right about our Foreign Service. She was smart and capable, committed to our country,” Kerry said. “She was someone who worked hard and put her life on the line so that others could live a better life.”22
The comments underscored the secretary’s personal connection to the diplomatic corps. And they enunciated the very real dangers its members confront on behalf of their countrymen and their international partners.
On the day he entered the State Department for the first time as secretary, February 4, 2013, John Kerry climbed a set of steps in the flag-decked main lobby so he could address his new coworkers. He repeated a comment made the month before during his confirmation hearing: “I said that the Senate is in my blood,” he told the packed lobby, “but it is also true that the Foreign Service is in my genes.”23
He explained that not only had his father, Richard, been a State Department Fore
ign Service officer, but his sister Peggy had worked most of her professional life at the US Mission to the United Nations.
His wife, Teresa, had done some translating for the UN early in her own career, and Kerry himself had spent twenty-eight years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the last four as its chairman. The committee helps oversee the State Department.
On this first day, though, the secretary found a unique way to underscore this link to his new staff.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out the Diplomatic Passport—Number 2927—he’d received as a child when he accompanied his father to Berlin for his inaugural assignment abroad.
The first stamp was from 1954 and the city of Le Havre, France, where the Kerry family had landed after a six-day sail across the Atlantic Ocean aboard the SS America. The secretary said:
That was a great adventure and I will tell you: 57 years later today, this is another great adventure. . . . Here, we can do the best of things that you can do in government. That’s what excites me. We get to try to make our nation safer. We get to try to make peace in the world, a world where there is far too much conflict and far too much killing. There are alternatives. We get to lift people out of poverty. We get to try to cure disease. We get to try to empower people with human rights. We get to speak to those who have no voice. We get to talk about empowering people through our ideals, and through those ideals hopefully they can change their lives.24
With almost childlike wonderment, he added: “That’s as good as it gets. And I’m proud to be part of it with you. So, now, let’s get to work.”25
The sense of grief and frustration Kerry later felt over Smedinghoff’s senseless death returned after each of the string of terrorist attacks from Paris to Bali that blotted his term.
The secretary said repeatedly that members of ISIS and other terrorist groups offered no positive vision for the world, only the specter of death for those who disagreed with them.
The tragedy of Smedinghoff’s being killed, as she distributed a means of enlightenment, only underscored the gulf between advancement and retrenchment.
Kerry labeled it “a stark contrast for all of the world to see between two very different sets of values.”26
_________
UNLESS THEY’VE LOST A passport abroad, most Americans have little appreciation for the reach and scope of the US Department of State, or the perils faced by its employees.
It’s the most forward-deployed and far-flung element of the US government. And although its workers get some protection from the United States and foreign governments, they don’t carry weapons like soldiers and Marines and must rely on their personal demeanor in many situations.
It was the first federal agency formed, when President George Washington signed legislation to create the Department of Foreign Affairs on July 27, 1789. Two months later, another bill changed its name to the Department of State.
Around the same time, President Washington appointed a fellow Founding Father—Thomas Jefferson—to be the first secretary of State. Jefferson had been serving in Paris as minister to France, helping establish his new nation’s initial relationships abroad.
For its first decade, the State Department was headquartered in Philadelphia, then the capital of the country. In 1800, the State Department and the capital itself moved to Washington, thanks partly to a backroom deal cut between Secretary Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. It gained wide attention in 2015 through the Broadway musical Hamilton and its song, “The Room Where It Happens.”
Behind closed doors, Hamilton got Jefferson and another Founder, James Madison, to support legislation under which southern states would help northern ones pay off their debts. In return, Hamilton pledged to support moving the capital south.
The State Department eventually moved to its current location, 2201 C Street, N.W., west of the White House and north of the Lincoln Memorial, when it took occupancy of an art deco structure intended for the War Department. “Foggy Bottom,” a shorthand reference derived from the name of the surrounding neighborhood, became the country’s diplomatic headquarters.
In 1960, an addition expanded the original building to 1.4 million square feet. The building, also referred to as “Main State,” was formally renamed in September 2000 as the Harry S Truman Building in honor of the thirty-third president, who enacted the Marshall Plan.
Today, HST houses more than eight thousand workers—a fraction of the nearly seventy thousand State Department employees worldwide.
Some of the rest work in nearby buildings in Washington and Virginia or offices in major cities across the United States. But the vast number serve overseas, spread across 285 embassies, consulates, or other installations in almost every place on the globe.
Everywhere they’re located is a little bit of the United States, endowed with diplomatic privileges, demarcated by the Stars and Stripes overhead, and representing a piece of home for Americans abroad—sometimes down to the hometown beers in the fridge or the US-style electrical outlets in the wall.
In fact, all the components for the current US embassy in Beijing—its walls, windows, roof, and furnishings—were shipped to China in diplomatically protected cargo containers. They were then assembled onsite by American contractors.
The reason? To inhibit the Chinese from installing eavesdropping devices.
An embassy is typically placed in a nation’s capital, such as the one in Ankara, Turkey. A consulate is usually placed in another major city, like the one in the tourist hot spot of Istanbul.
The embassy in Paris, on the edge of the Place de la Concorde, is where the US ambassador to France works. It offers him or her easy access to the nearby Élysée Palace, where the French president lives and works, and the Quai d’Orsay, a building across the Seine River housing the office of the French foreign minister.
Yet with so many Americans visiting France, especially in the summer, there also are six consulates in the country: Bordeaux, Lyon, Marseille, Rennes, Strasbourg, and Toulouse.
In other less-traveled parts of the world, there may be just one diplomatic outpost for an entire country. The US embassy in Dhaka, Bangladesh, is an example.
While embassies are the seat of local diplomatic relations for the United States abroad, they also are home to workers from other agencies within the United States government. Some have offices for Commerce and Treasury Department employees, as well as FBI agents who work with local law enforcement officials.
Host-nation governments may monitor the comings and goings at the gate, believing the United States also places personnel from intelligence agencies in embassies, under the cover of diplomats.
Embassies represent a huge investment and asset for the United States government because they’re sovereign territory in countries around the world. When you step into one, you’re governed not by local law but US rules and regulations. A host nation can’t step foot inside uninvited, and it has the obligation to protect the facility—as it would expect the US government to do with its own embassy in Washington or its consulates around the United States.
The workers within an embassy must attend their share of social functions, mixing with the host-nation government officials and leaders of local industry at cocktail parties as part of their jobs; but they also have more routine work to do for their country.
Consular Affairs officials interview locals and issue visas to those seeking to come to the United States. They also can resolve that moment of panic that strikes Americans abroad who lose their passport. After an interview, they can reissue one on the spot.
Economic officers work to promote US business abroad and to ease access to US markets for foreign enterprises seeking to do business back in the United States.
All employees, no matter their specialty, have a responsibility to take what they’ve learned abroad and send their findings back to their colleagues at Main State. Their information is shared not only within the State Department but also across the US government.
The
se reports come back to Washington in the form of emails or “cables,” formal dispatches whose name stems from the electronic wires that used to transmit teletype messages back home. They’re usually relayed to various agencies or Congress after being repackaged to answer specific questions.
In this sense, embassies and consulates are not only forward-deployed physical assets of the United States but also forward-deployed listening posts.
Some of that listening generates intelligence in the cloak-and-dagger sense, but much of it also provides more generic insight to the executive and legislative branches of government. It may be about who in a certain country is on the rise politically, what business may be wanting to work within or seek investment from the United States, or which nations need a little TLC from the president or others in an administration.
During Secretary Kerry’s time at the State Department, a young Frenchman named Emmanuel Macron rose from deputy to the French president to economic minister to the leader of an opposition party. He became president of France himself little more than three months after Kerry left office.
His ascent was dutifully reported in cables sent from Embassy Paris and handled back in Washington by a staff whose department has an organization all its own.
_________
OF THE SEVENTY THOUSAND State Department employees overall, the vast majority of them aren’t Americans. Some forty-five thousand are locally employed staff (LES), foreign nationals like those South Vietnamese in Saigon who temper their allegiance to their home country so they can work on behalf of the United States government.
Some might serve as interpreters. Others may manage the motor pool or handle clerical work. Still other LESs use their contacts to brief US officials on local customs or expedite them through the nearby airport.
And some are like Mustafa Akarsu.
He was a Turk and Muslim manning an outer checkpoint at the US embassy in Ankara on February 1, 2013. That was when a man wearing a trench coat attempted to enter but instead detonated a suicide bomb beneath his garment when Akarsu wouldn’t let him inside.
