The Good American

by Robert D. Kaplan

  Whenever Gersony reminisces about Cuny, a smile often crosses his face. Summing up Cuny, Gersony says: “I like people who are good talkers because I like to listen, and Fred was one of the greatest talkers I ever knew.”

  * * *

  —

  Eastern Sudan, with its panorama of refugee camps filled with ethnic Tigreans fleeing war and famine in neighboring Ethiopia, had sparked an NGO industry on its own, one essentially run out of the Acropole Hotel. Meanwhile, approximately 120,000 refugees from eastern Chad had tramped over the border into western Sudan and almost no one knew anything about them, or why they were really there. From faraway Khartoum it all seemed a mystery. One day in July 1985, DCM David Shinn called Gersony into his office and asked him if he would go out to the Sudanese-Chadian border area and “check on the situation.” Gersony readily agreed. He instinctively hated following the crowd, which meant in this case reporting on the ethnic Tigreans, and much preferred to strike out on his own.

  He went to the embassy motor pool and insisted on the best car and the best driver-mechanic-translator-fixer, all in one, who was available. This meant a new Land Rover and Andrew, a tall thirty-year-old Dinka who was a fluent English speaker and a virtual genius at maneuvering in difficult situations. He and Andrew loaded up on food, extra tires, and as many large plastic jugs of gasoline as they could fit in the trunk. They drove for more than three days almost straight westward, across 890 miles of the Sahara, through the vast and naked provinces of North Darfur and West Darfur. The roads were badly rutted. “It was the kind of really bad trip that your back will never forgive you for,” Gersony recalls.

  It was the rainy season and Andrew taught Gersony how to identify and navigate around “black cotton soil,” a loamy cross between mud and quicksand, in which the wheels of a car would sink two feet into the muck, stranding you in the middle of nowhere. Gersony’s habit of eating only once a day was a blessing in such circumstances. In addition to the snacks they brought with them, they ate camel liver and fried onions at local guest houses where they spent the night. One restaurant was merely a stifling room with a big table and a small table. While they ate at the small table, a group of Libyans in white robes and wound turbans stormed in and occupied the big table. This was an era when Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya was a radical, anti-Western regime that excited fear and mystery. Libyan convoys often crossed into western Sudan and the pro-Western Khartoum government was powerless to stop them. Gersony remembers being shocked at the way the Libyans spit watermelon seeds all over the table and floor with no regard for him and Andrew.

  Their arrival in the Sudanese town of El Geneina, on the border with Chad, brought no letup in discomfort. Summer in the Sahara meant temperatures well over 100 degrees and the feeling of no oxygen to breathe. There were no air conditioners. The lonely relief workers at the UNHCR outpost appeared to have no idea why the Chadians kept crossing into Sudan. They told Gersony that he and Andrew could not travel in the area or visit the makeshift refugee camps without the permission of the local sheikh, who invited Gersony and Andrew for a Saturday lunch. There was no refrigeration. Bugs were everywhere on the table and the food itself seemed to be moving. But the iron laws of local hospitality commanded that they eat what was put in front of them, and the food was generous and splendid in the eyes of the host. It was like the famous dinner scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Gersony was no Indiana Jones. He always had a sensitive stomach and was sick for two days afterward.

  With the sheikh’s permission, the two drove north for two hundred miles along the Chadian border, sleeping and staying in each of the six refugee camps along the way. This time there were no roads. The conditions in the camps, with their wattle huts, makeshift shelters, and tents in a whirling sea of sand and dirt—with hardly any landscape features—were worse than on the journey west from Khartoum to El Geneina.

  It came to Gersony, still a bit sick, as well as filthy and exhausted, that this was an opportunity to try something new. Not totally new, just a further elaboration of what he had been learning about, in regard to how to talk and listen to refugees and displaced persons from Guatemala to El Salvador to Uganda to southern Thailand. He required a more methodical, comprehensive, and persuasive version of what Roland Bunch had done when Bunch had wandered around earthquake-devastated Guatemala. It was awkward since he was teaching himself—the ultimate autodidact who had never finished high school. He decided he would collect the ages, home villages, and other details of everyone he interviewed. “If I could collect enough information from enough eyewitnesses, I could put a picture together of what was happening. After all, here I was working with a tabula rasa. Practically no NGO had interviewed these people.”

  He resolved to ask no leading questions. “How many goats did you have? How many cattle? Tell me what happened the day you left your village. What was the first thing you heard, the first thing you saw?” touching and pulling on his ear, and then pulling on his eye, to give the subject faith in the translation. “You said you were running,” pumping his arms. “What was the next thing you did? And the next?” Soon the subject would begin to speak spontaneously, with confidence, learning the cadence, so that there was no need to ask more questions. He would just listen.

  “The most sensitive things they told me on their own. Had I specifically asked, they never would have told me.” And “no breaks!” he adds. “If you give them breaks, they start thinking about all the implications for their security of what they have just told you and henceforth may clam up.”

  There were often two translators present: from the local dialect to Arabic, and from Arabic to English. This gave him time to write notes during the conversation. But it was broiling hot in the wattle huts, with not enough water to drink. He was dizzy and only wanted to doze off. Yet he had to act interested during the translations, even when nothing useful was said—and when so much of what was said had been said before by other refugees. To look disinterested was to show disrespect. He began training himself to do this in the same obsessive-compulsive way that he took notes and did so much else.

  “I always said to the person, ‘You are my teacher, explain to me what happened.’ Because I was taller and white, it was a way for them to be less intimidated of me. Who in the past had ever asked them their opinion of anything, especially of the women? Thus I wanted my interviews to be cathartic and satisfying for them.”

  All of this was as much the traveler’s technique as that of the journalist. It involved no tape recorder, no camera, no electronics. It was still a time in Africa when such devices often made people suspicious and on their guard. And when soldiers searched you at roadblocks, or in your hut even, they would be less suspicious of a pen and notebook than they would be of a camera and tape recorder. He was starting to learn how to collect the kind of absolutely vital humint—human intelligence—that the cyber and digital age has increasingly rendered obsolete. Again, he learned this all on his own. He had never studied journalism or associated much with journalists. And he had usually kept his distance from the NGO community, even at the Acropole, to the degree that was possible.

  He hated it. It was grueling, skull-crushing. He had to concentrate for hours on end. And it was just so hot and the air so heavy. The dust was like a paste on your skin. You were regularly breathless. He interviewed roughly sixty people in western Sudan, each for hours, then ran out of steam. The stories were mainly identical and it only increased the tedium, and therefore his fatigue. But the repetition was a good thing. For it allowed him to form general assumptions about what had happened to these people. That is when he started to take pride in his method, when he finally began to feel less insecure about himself. He knew he was on to something.

  He kept hearing the same word, over and over again: “Goran…Goran…Goran.”

  “Goran warriors on horseback arrived at my house. They stole all our goats and whatever else there was. They raped m
y wife. They burned my house down. So we fled.” It was the same story, with variations, over and over. They never disemboweled anyone. There were no roundups. There was a drought. The Goran, among other things, were desperate and under pressure, and they just ravished the local population. Anyone who opposed them was killed.

  Gersony was out in Darfur by the Chadian border for three weeks. He returned to the Acropole, spoke to no one, and went to the embassy, where he wrote a mega-cable to the State Department. It was cleared by DCM David Shinn, with a copy sent to the U.S. Embassy in the Chadian capital of N’Djamena.

  Two days later, Shinn called Gersony into his office and said, “Look at this.” It was a cable from the U.S. Embassy in N’Djamena that literally accused Gersony of inventing facts. The embassy had excellent sources, the cable said, and it knew, therefore, that Gersony had made everything up. If Gersony had guts, he would come through N’Djamena and travel to eastern Chad with embassy officials. “It was a totally intemperate cable and uncalled-for,” says one Washington-based source. The cable, written by Ralph Graner, the American chargé d’affaires in the Chadian capital, was copied to Princeton Lyman, the deputy assistant secretary of state for African affairs. Gersony had intellectually usurped the U.S. Embassy in Chad’s territory and invaded its prerogative.

  But there was more going on than that.

  It takes a bit of explanation.

  This was the Cold War. Chad’s leader, Hissène Habré, was America’s and France’s ally against the mercurial, radical firebrand Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, who fit perfectly into Moscow’s anti-Western design. And Gersony’s cable had played against Washington’s counterstrategy to Gaddafi. Five years earlier, in July 1980, Gaddafi had invaded northern Chad’s Aouzou Strip and annexed it to Libya. The Aouzou Strip was a mineral-rich band that extended Libyan territory sixty-five miles south into Chad along the border of the two countries. Except for a narrow column of mountains the Aouzou was a sandbox. Libya claimed it had been a southern outpost of the Ottoman Empire and thus was rightfully inherited by Libya. In 1982, Habré came to power in Chad with CIA and French support, which provided him with arms, financing, and military training for his troops to contain Gaddafi. By the time Gersony visited the Sudan-Chad border, the United States was providing Habré with the full gamut of paramilitary support. This would pay off in 1987 when Habré’s “technicals”—perhaps the first time the once-famous phrase was used—driving Toyota Land Cruisers with machine guns mounted on them, would defeat Libyan tanks, which couldn’t maneuver in the Aouzou’s sands. Yet Habré, an ethnic Goran from northern Chad, remained weak. Among his perceived enemies in Chad’s centrifugal ethnic and tribal politics were the Zaghawa of eastern Chad. In fact, an ethnic Zaghawa, Idriss Déby, would go on to topple Habré in 1990. Gersony, in 1985, had stumbled upon a case of ethnic cleansing by the pro-American and pro-French Hissène Habré. In 2016, Habré would be found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to life imprisonment by a court in Senegal. “Habré was one tough desert warrior in a part of the world where coercive power often has an ethnic base,” Chester Crocker, the assistant secretary of state for Africa during the Reagan years, explains.

  Gersony accepted the challenge of the U.S. Embassy in Chad with pleasure. He would leave Khartoum within a few days and head immediately to N’Djamena to meet with Graner and his staff. His emerging methodology had given him real confidence for the first time in his professional life, and this challenge would give him an opportunity to validate it. “I knew that what I found could not be wrong.”

  * * *

  —

  When Gersony arrived in Chad, he had another advantage. Tony Jackson from Guatemala was now the representative for Oxfam in N’Djamena. With his fluent French, he promised to help Gersony in the eastern part of this former French colonial territory. He also gave Gersony the hope that the local NGO community would cooperate with him.

  Chad was “flat, huge, dry, brilliant. I loved it,” Jackson says with his typical enthusiasm. N’Djamena was bare, dusty, with the odd tree and camel, and with broad avenues: an intoxicating emptiness. There was a massive Roman Catholic cathedral to make the point of France’s colonial resolve, even as its design carried a hint of the spare desert geometry all around. Large flies lay on the food of the local eateries. But there was a gourmet French restaurant or two and, even in a postcolonial Islamic country, plenty of red vermouth and beer to be had. And in the local market you could buy ceiling fans or any other convenience you required. The U.S. Embassy in N’Djamena was small but spread out. The chargé, Ralph Graner, was short with a stubby round face. Graner treated Gersony like a barking dog. The hostility was palpable. Graner had a sidekick whom he relied upon, Leslie McBride, a former Peace Corps volunteer and contractor for USAID. McBride was short and thin with glasses. He had married a local Chadian woman and lived permanently in N’Djamena, and thus, analytically speaking, was to some extent compromised. “You’ve made a huge mistake,” he told Gersony. Gersony wasn’t bothered. He had encountered hostile embassy types before, notably in La Paz, Bolivia, where FSOs were administering, as it turned out, a flawed drought relief program in the Altiplano there.

  Tony Jackson in Chad in 1985.

  Graner and McBride told Gersony that he would be accompanied by an official of the Chadian interior ministry on his visit to the eastern border area. Gersony replied that no one would be honest with him in the presence of such an official. They also said that official translators would be provided him. Gersony said he wanted Tony Jackson to be his French translator. They said there would be no room on the small plane for Jackson. Gersony drew a line and insisted. They relented. Gersony left N’Djamena at six the next morning. On the small Cessna-type plane were Gersony, Jackson, McBride, the CIA station chief, and the interior ministry official. There had been no time to first interview local NGO workers in the capital.

  The plane landed in Abeche, roughly seventy-five miles west of the border with Sudan. McBride had insisted on seeing the prefect there. The prefect served strong black coffee. Gersony knew he would not sleep that night and didn’t. The prefect said he was mystified by the claim that Goran warriors were razing the area and driving tens of thousands of locals across the border into Sudan. McBride then began berating Gersony for his inaccurate cable.

  The next morning the six crammed into a Toyota Land Cruiser that had been provided them and drove due north toward Biltine, about thirty-five miles away. There was not a human being in sight. Jackson by this time had been charming the interior ministry official in French.

  “You say you do interviews. You haven’t interviewed anybody yet,” McBride said to Gersony in the car.

  “We haven’t seen anybody to interview on this road,” Gersony replied.

  In the distance they saw a human being. As their vehicle approached, it turned out to be an old, short, bent-over, grizzled man in rags. “Why don’t you interview him?” McBride said to Gersony.

  They all poured out of the car like circus clowns and surrounded the old man. Gersony was worried that the man, whatever he knew, would be too intimidated to tell the truth.

  Gersony began in his usual way. “How are you? We are pleased to meet you. May we ask you a few questions? By the way, where are you walking to?”

  Suddenly the man exploded into a fast verbal torrent, unable to be interrupted, and Gersony picked out the words “Goran…Goran…Goran.”

  It was a cumbersome, interminable process. First the entire speech had to be translated from the Chadian dialect into French, for Jackson to translate into English. The old man said that the day before, Goran horsemen had come to his house, beat him, raped and killed his wife, stole his food and his goats. Since he couldn’t survive without his goats he was going to walk to Sudan. Then the interior ministry official started questioning the old man and it emerged that all the man’s neighbors had already fled over the border. “Why do you thin
k there is nobody here!” the old man said.

  McBride turned ashen. Gersony felt like kissing him for picking out this man for him to interview. “We can’t spend all day with this man, we have a meeting with the subprefect in Biltine,” McBride said. The six of them poured back into the Land Cruiser and continued north: sand, scrub, and desolation. Not a single human being.

  In Biltine at the subprefect’s office, they all sat on a round couch. Tea was served. McBride announced that he would conduct the interview. The subprefect told McBride that there were no problems in his region. McBride turned to Gersony and said, “You see!”

  But after a pause of a few seconds, the subprefect said, “Unless you mean the Goran horsemen,” who he then said for months had been pillaging the area and driving people over the border into Sudan.

  The next morning they drove due east on a dirt track toward the town of Guereda, near the border with Sudan. About halfway there, they came upon black cotton soil. Gersony recommended that they make a hard right turn in order to drive around it. McBride said he was in charge and they would drive straight through it, without turning. Gersony and Jackson left the Land Cruiser and took their dry food and sleeping bags with them. The Land Cruiser proceeded and promptly sunk over a foot into the muck. Gersony and Jackson watched as McBride and the driver dug the car out.

  By now it was noon on the desert in eastern Chad. The sun pounded like a sledgehammer. They began driving again and soon came to a wadi, halfway between Biltine and the Sudanese border, where water was flowing from some recent freak rain. Gersony said they should not go through the wadi, since the water was deeper than it appeared. McBride disagreed. This time everyone except McBride and the driver got out of the Land Cruiser and took their sleeping bags and other personal effects. McBride then got out of the car and directed the driver to inch forward into the wadi. At first the Land Cruiser had no trouble crossing the wadi. Then suddenly it dove at about a thirty-degree angle and became partially submerged in deeper water. Gersony and Jackson watched as they ate a lunch of dried food with the others.