The Good American

by Robert D. Kaplan

  Stubbs took Gersony to see the Thai National Security Council director, Squadron Leader Prasong Soonsiri. Prasong was welcoming and hospitable, wearing a permanent, unreadable smile. He, too, was balancing this three-ring refugee circus against military, security, and domestic policy concerns, and was clearly under much pressure. Beyond gaining an appreciation for Thai sensitivities, after this meeting (and others) Gersony believed he still had no idea how to solve the problem, and never would. The members of the NGO community he met with in Bangkok were thankful for the new energy he was apparently bringing to the issue, but they had no substantial advice for him.

  Finally Gersony flew from Bangkok to Songkhla, at the southern tip of Thailand, near the border with Malaysia, where he experienced a large and fenced-in refugee camp for the first time in his life. It shook him. At the moment, Gersony was in the company of his new host, the U.S. consul general in Songkhla, Franklin Pierce (“Pancho”) Huddle, Jr., a constantly talking, whirling dervish of a man who was a linguist, National Geographic photographer, pianist, and windsurfer. (“Pancho” was the nickname for Franklin in Mexico, where his mother’s family had lived for a time.) But Pancho also contained his fair share of cynicism. For Gersony was merely the most recent in a long line of consultants and NGOs who had come to Songkhla to work on the piracy issue.

  For Gersony, emerging from his aesthetic seaside hotel, the Samila Beach, and the pleasant if nondescript U.S. Consulate—with the nearby blue water and lush vegetation making for a tourist paradise—the refugee camp was certainly a contrast: just dust, clay, and barbwire; nothing green, nothing growing. People were densely packed in prefabricated dwellings. It was an ugly place. “And what had the whole international community done for these people beyond demarches to Squadron Leader Prasong?” Gersony thought. Whenever someone said Give the Thais another coast guard cutter, Gersony crashed his hands against his head.

  The first thing that came into his mind was that the occupants of this camp were survivors. So how did they survive? They had grabbed on to some flotsam and had then been picked up by Thai fishermen. As he would find out, rescues exceeded attacks. More Thai fishermen were rescuing these people than were stealing, raping, and killing them. This was something you rarely heard about in Bangkok, he thought.

  He decided then and there that he wanted to speak to the refugees. He had done a bit of this in Guatemala and El Salvador. In setting up his language schools in Antigua he had learned that speaking to people one-on-one, isolated from everyone else except for perhaps a translator, was the most intense, coherent form of interpersonal communication. “I hate all types of meetings,” he explains. “You don’t get the truth in meetings like you do one-on-one. You never learn substance in a group since everyone is interrupting and performing for each other. People will not unburden themselves in front of others like they will before one neutral stranger.” In other words, he had learned on his own what every good journalist instinctively knows. And because Washington runs on public events and meetings, he was coming to hate the entire Washington approach to learning about the world.

  Gersony was at a turning point, though he didn’t know it. He didn’t yet know that what would come to define him over the next decade would be his desire not to talk (which would have made him more at home in Washington), but to listen.

  So he interviewed more than twenty Vietnamese refugees one-on-one with a translator—though there was one woman who insisted on being present with her daughter, so it was a one-on-two interview. This woman and her two daughters were captured and gang-raped by pirates (Thai fishermen) for two weeks before being thrown into the sea, where they were able to grab on to logs and eventually be rescued by other Thai fishermen, some of whom sailed to Songkhla and others to Pulau Bidong on the other side of the border in Malaysia, where the woman’s second daughter now was. Neither government would allow family reunification.

  Gersony spent ten days at the refugee camp listening to such stories. He picked up some interesting details. The number of rescues was limited because survivors had to be fed and the fishermen, as well as incurring an extra expense, did not want to get diverted from their work. All the Thai fishing boats had identification numbers on their bows, which the refugees remembered. Yet there were rarely any arrests or prosecutions. Moreover, there were two kinds of pirates: a full-time, hard-core element and others who occasionally attacked Vietnamese boats that they just happened to come across.

  The consul general, Pancho Huddle, was both impressed and mystified by Gersony. No previous consultant had hung around the camp this long, his head bent over, always writing in his notebook. But a notion was beginning to form in Gersony’s mind. It occurred to him that the answer to the problem was not at sea, to be solved by the cutters, but on land—on the docks in places like Songkhla where the boats arrived and departed, and where the fishermen-turned-pirates congregated in bars and bragged about their exploits. That’s where the intelligence was. He did not achieve this realization by sitting at a café table with a drink in hand and staring at the docks, the way it would happen in the movies. He actually didn’t know when he got the idea. It was probably while furiously writing in his notebook while interviewing refugees. Gersony’s mind was not particularly visual. His was more the mind of an abstract thinker—again, that of a commodity trader. His mind was at its most creative while he was writing down what people told him.

  Gersony also knew that Refugee Programs was not a line bureau like the Asia or Africa or Latin America bureaus, that is, it was not operational: it was outside the chain of command and the policy decision-making hierarchy. So he couldn’t do anything without the approval of the U.S. ambassador and the deputy chief of mission (DCM) at the embassy in Bangkok. Thailand at the time constituted the third-largest U.S. embassy in the world. Not only was Thailand the nerve center of refugee traffic, but it was a regional power in its own right, and a critical node to American influence in Southeast Asia during the Cold War and afterward. The embassy wasn’t a building but a series of buildings with annexes. Thus, the ambassador and his DCM were not ordinary diplomats. They must be formidable characters, Gersony assumed, as well as the keys to unlocking the substantial influence of the State Department’s Asia bureau.

  So first he had to talk to Bill Stubbs, the refugee coordinator. He did not want to go to the ambassador and the DCM without a fully fleshed-out plan.

  Gersony met with Stubbs. It turned out that the latter had a friend who was the head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in Thailand. The DEA official who met with Gersony, courtesy of Stubbs, told him that he got information on drug shipments by paying informants at the docks.

  “Can you recommend someone good?” Gersony asked.

  “Matter of fact, I can. His name is Harold ‘Tex’ Lierly. Peace Corps veteran, speaks Thai, married to a Thai woman, and he now works for the DEA.”

  Gersony liked the combination. Peace Corps and DEA meant that Tex Lierly was both a humanitarian and a rugged law-enforcement type. Plus, he knew the local language and had gone native somewhat. All good things. Gersony next made a big ask of Bill Stubbs. Could he now have a full two hours of the busy refugee coordinator’s time?

  The plan that Gersony presented to Stubbs had four parts. Very briefly, this is what it entailed.

  Part 1. Forget the coast guard cutters. “We’re done patrolling the greater South China Sea. It has gotten us nowhere. It’s the equivalent of claiming that we’ve done something, while in fact we’ve done nothing. It’s the bureaucracy’s way of just getting through the day.”

  Part 2. “We need land intelligence, informants and witnesses on the docks. We should forget about the part-time pirates of convenience. We will concentrate all of our efforts on the hard-core element, the ones who after their voyages get drunk and brag at the dockside bars. Survivors will need to be debriefed in the camps. The Thai Marine Police will need encouragement and assistan
ce in this regard. A few prosecutions will change the whole atmosphere of the fishermen community. Tex Lierly or someone like him from the DEA running the whole operation from above will constitute the dynamic change factor. Call it external intervention.”

  Part 3. Start giving the Thais credit for all the rescues that their fishermen have done. “We’re finished beating up on the Thais. By changing the public atmosphere, we’ll get mission buy-in from the host country authorities.” Show Squadron Leader Prasong some respect. Do something other than complain to him. Give him a two-for-one option. Tell him the United States will take in a certain amount of refugees: “I don’t know, say 25,000. But for every refugee that Thai fishermen rescue we will allow into the United States an additional two refugees from Songkhla or the other camps.” Yes, the Thais will play with the numbers. “So we’ll give green cards to a few hundred more refugees. Big deal. We’ll be helping to take the problem off the Thais’ hands. It will change the atmosphere of the bilateral relationship and help the embassy’s position here.”

  Part 4. Family reunifications within the refugee camp network in Thailand and Malaysia. “This is a no-brainer.”

  Stubbs liked the plan. He was tired of being the bad guy with Squadron Leader Prasong. He got Gersony in to brief the deputy chief of mission, whom Gersony had been avoiding. But finally he was ready. “This plan will sing,” Gersony thought.

  He was scheduled for forty-five minutes with the DCM. The meeting lasted twice as long.

  “Come right in! I hear you’re doing great work!” exclaimed the DCM, putting Gersony instantly at ease.

  The DCM was rather tall, with a barrel chest and a large head. The office was big, airy, and full of neat stacks of paperwork. It communicated that nothing gets lost here. Nothing goes unread. There was a long couch and two easy chairs. Gersony had just met another legend in the Foreign Service, Charles W. Freeman, Jr., who insisted that everybody call him Chas.

  Chas Freeman was a down-to-earth operator who made up his mind fast. He was also among the most brilliant diplomats ever to represent the United States, the one who in 1979 effectively created the refugee bureau within the State Department. His oral history reads like an intellectual feast, where he talks about, among so much else, the ascendancy and decline of the a.d. sixth century Byzantine general Belisarius and the nuances of the Saudi personality. (He later became ambassador to Saudi Arabia and his diplomatic cables would be considered the most insightful of the First Gulf War.) Chas’s family tree in the United States goes back to both the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies in 1621. He was born in 1943 and grew up in the Bahamas. He took a double course load at Yale, where he read voluminously Russian, Spanish, and French history. He soon spoke fluent Mandarin and Taiwanese, and translated for President Richard Nixon on his 1972 trip to China, as well as writing much of Nixon’s and Henry Kissinger’s China briefing books.

  Charles (“Chas”) Freeman (right), U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, with Secretary of State James Baker III during the Gulf War crisis in 1991. Freeman provided critical help to Gersony in Thailand and Mozambique in the 1980s.

  Someone like this doesn’t lack confidence, and that’s why he made up his mind so fast. After hearing about Gersony’s plan from Stubbs earlier, he had made up his mind about Gersony before the contractor even walked into his office. In his oral history, Chas says about Gersony: “He’s just a very indefatigable, wise investigator, who has a habit of getting to the root of problems and dissecting them in a way that facilitates designing a solution.”1

  Gersony hashed out the plan with Chas, including all the pros and cons, and told him about the refugees he had interviewed. The main worry Gersony had was that allowing the female survivors to testify against the perpetrators might raise the chances that the pirates would henceforth kill the girls rather than throwing them into the sea alive, where they might have a chance to survive. Gersony would later learn that this was a common generic worry of law enforcement; yet, if you permitted crimes to continue merely out of fear of making the situation worse for some, you could never help the many more who were affected. The civilized world cannot afford to be paralyzed thus.

  “Write it all up. I want cables!” Chas said. Chas thought at the time that at least here was one plan dealing with the piracy issues that would improve, rather than worsen, relations with the Thais, who had a tendency to take all confrontations personally. “Most consultants foul the nest; Gersony always left it in a better place,” Chas Freeman explains. As it would turn out, Chas and Stubbs barely changed a word. It was then that Gersony knew he had the embassy behind him, and he once again thanked the gods for the mentorship of John Bennett in Uganda.

  “See the ambassador,” Chas said.

  The DCM would certainly brief the ambassador of the plan ahead of Gersony’s visit with him. It was to be little more than a courtesy call. However, the DCM knew that if Gersony could return to Washington able to say that he had met with the ambassador, it would improve the chances that the State Department and its Asia bureau would approve his plan.

  Before his late morning meeting with the ambassador, Gersony had to take an antibiotic for the bronchitis he had caught from the refugees in southern Thailand. The instructions on the vial said only to ingest with food, otherwise nausea could develop. In his usual obsessive way, he took the pill before the meeting, assuming it would only be a courtesy call of a few minutes and then he could have lunch in the embassy cafeteria. It turned out the ambassador was late. When he finally greeted Gersony, Gersony was struck by the ambassador’s dignified, gracious, and aristocratic bearing. “The ultimate WASP,” Gersony thought. “I just wanted you to know that you’ve done a great job,” the ambassador said in a crisp, lofty manner, intensifying Gersony’s first impression. Gersony also espied all the beautiful oriental objects in the spacious office.

  The ambassador, John Gunther Dean, was born a Jew in the German city of Breslau in Silesia in 1926, to a family that legally changed its name from Dienstfertig upon arrival in America. Educated at Harvard and the Sorbonne, he was fluent in English, French, German, and Danish. Dean would serve with distinction as an American diplomat throughout Asia and Africa. He opened the post in Togo, played a role in the Vietnam negotiations, and was the ambassador in Cambodia who was evacuated five days before the Khmer Rouge takeover; he was due to be ambassador to India after completing his Thai assignment. He was also the U.S. ambassador to Lebanon from 1978 to 1981, during the Israeli invasion. Smiling broadly, Chas Freeman says about this old-school ambassador, “John Gunther Dean was more than a dinosaur, he was a tyrannosaurus rex.”

  Dean had no doubts about Gersony, and with the pleasantries over, he asked Gersony where else he had worked. This would not be a five-minute courtesy call. When Gersony mentioned El Salvador, the ambassador asked, “How was my good friend Deane Hinton doing there?” It was at the moment when Gersony began to bring the Salvadoran death squad leader Bobbie d’Aubuisson into the conversation that he turned sweaty and pale, suddenly overtaken by nausea. Dean smiled, saw the problem, and pointed to the ambassador’s private bathroom. Gersony returned after a few minutes and resumed the conversation. He had Dean’s support for his anti-piracy plan.

  * * *

  —

  His preliminary work done in Thailand, soon Gersony was back in Washington, where he briefed Dewey.

  “See Wolfowitz. Give him the whole brief,” Dewey said.

  Paul Wolfowitz was then the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs. He ran Asia for the State Department, in other words. He played a role in ousting Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos from power and would later become the U.S. ambassador to largely Muslim Indonesia, compiling an impressive career as an Asia hand, where he learned that societies like the Philippines and Indonesia, contrary to the predictions of realists and pessimists, could indeed evolve into functioning democracies. When he transferred that
logic to Iraq, this belief would become his undoing. To Gersony at the beginning of 1985, Wolfowitz was practically an Elliott Abrams look-alike: another neoconservative Reagan political appointee, young, dark-haired, intense, highly intelligent, yet a bit more somber than Abrams, if still friendly. The appointment was originally scheduled for half an hour but Dewey got it extended to ninety minutes. Gersony needed the extra time.

  “I’m not an executive summary kind of guy. I want my clients to know all the facts. Executive summaries are the bane of Washington,” says Gersony. “They simplify a world that is in fact complex.”

  Wolfowitz was enthusiastic about everything Gersony told him. He was deeply engaged and kept asking questions throughout. What could go wrong? Gersony asked himself. He now had John Gunther Dean and Chas Freeman of the Foreign Service aristocracy and Paul Wolfowitz of the Reaganite neoconservative wing all on the same page. This was the Cold War when such divisions were muted compared to what would come afterward; it was a time when neoconservatives still had credibility. Gersony would soon get Elliott Abrams’s support for the anti-piracy plan, too. “Bob was the first one who could explain to me what the term ‘Thai piracy’ meant in practice—what actually happened out at sea. Plus, he had a theory of the case, of what to do about it,” explains Abrams.

  But when Gersony brought up, in Wolfowitz’s office, the two-for-one option in part 3 of his plan, which called for the United States to provide visas to two more boat people for every refugee that the Thais rescued, the Thai desk officer and the other Foreign Service officers in the room started coughing and turning cold.

  “We can’t really do that, Mr. Secretary.”

  “Why?” Wolfowitz asked.