The Good American

by Robert D. Kaplan

  So Gersony improvised.

  He began conducting one-on-one interviews at his humble pension back in town with all the NGO workers, both international and locally hired, who worked in the camp or were in contact with it in some way. Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, or Doctors Without Borders), arguably the most prestigious of the non-governmental organizations, later to win a Nobel Peace Prize, had recently pulled out of the camp, on principle, the group claimed. That gave him a hint that there was really something wrong there. (Years later, MSF would publish an online confessional admitting to similar issues with Colomoncagua that Gersony would soon discover.)2 Every NGO that Gersony interviewed emphasized that the camp should not be moved. But they avoided answering the sensitive subjects that he had brought up in his questions, regarding the camp’s complicity in aiding the Salvadoran leftist guerrillas. Several NGO workers, however, as an act of conscience, told him that two people had been executed by the camp authorities: one for simply wanting to go back to El Salvador; the other for challenging the committee about cutting food rations to dissenters—letting them starve, in other words. Their bodies were buried outside the camp.

  Nevertheless, Gersony concluded that there was no evidence that the camp was being used as a transit center for weapons and fertilizer-based explosives. There was no evidence of tunnels under the border, or anything like that. But food and medicine were being diverted into El Salvador, and in terms of Marxist indoctrination Colomoncagua was very much a “Khmer Rouge–style camp inside Honduras.” Because Gersony had also gone during this period to visit Mesa Grande, further west along the border, where he was able to interview anybody he wanted, the contrast between the two facilities was stark.

  * * *

  —

  Flying back to Tegucigalpa from Colomoncagua in November, he asked himself, “What did I miss?” All he knew was that he was headed for a “shitstorm” at the embassy in Tegucigalpa and in Washington. The embassy in San Salvador was claiming that Colomoncagua was a guerrilla rear base. “What kind of big rear base? Are they crazy? However, what was it that I didn’t know?”

  He decided that the first person he needed to see was the CIA station chief in Tegucigalpa. He wanted to leave no stone unturned, and the CIA might know things, many things, about the camp that he didn’t know and which “the Agency” was not sharing with the State Department. And if he was going to get into a battle with Ed Corr, the ambassador in San Salvador, and with Gene Dewey and Elliott Abrams, he wanted the CIA alongside him.

  Honduras was the center for running the contra war against the Nicaraguan Sandinistas. Not surprisingly the station chief, in addition to being measured and analytical, had the rugged, craggy looks to demonstrate that he had been around, fighting many battles, bureaucratic and otherwise. He loaned Gersony a young subordinate: a working-class guy, with every kind of security clearance imaginable. This guy read everything in the CIA files. He came back after a few days and told Gersony: “You nailed it. We have nothing to indicate that Colomoncagua is a major transit point for the Salvadoran guerrillas.”

  There had never been a reason to use it as a transit point in any case. Honduras’s southeastern coastline by both El Salvador and Nicaragua was much better suited. The fact that the State Department heavy hitters did not know these obvious truths was sadly typical of a vast imperial capital—Washington, D.C.—where one part of the bureaucracy was not informed about what to another part was obvious, and where ideology often blinded people to facts inherent on many maps.

  Gersony and the station chief concluded that, in any case, the Honduran government would never move the camp; and that if the camp were moved, the camp committee would make sure that some of the elderly and young children were killed, so that they could blame it on the Reagan administration. It would make for a great propaganda tool. For the next few years, the “massacre at Colomoncagua” would play in the world media. And what would the U.S. government gain from all this?

  Gersony’s recommendation was to tightly patrol the camp from the outside with trusted Honduran troops, and then half of the smuggling that the camp committee was involved in would immediately dry up. And get UNHCR inside the camp. Mere presence would help further. After all, wasn’t that UNHCR’s mandate?

  Gersony provided a long brief to the Tegucigalpa embassy staff. The CIA, the political section, and the refugee officer all approved the plan. Ambassadors love whenever a whole team approves a plan, since it often doesn’t happen and it gets them somewhat off the hook. Furthermore, the new ambassador, Everett Ellis Briggs, was pleased not to have to recommend moving the camp, which would have caused the embassy untold complications. Briggs, a towering, Dartmouth-educated son of an ambassador himself, was a real conservative Brahmin whom the influential Republican senator from North Carolina, Jesse Helms, really liked. Thus, Briggs had clout with the rabid anti-communist crowd on Central America.

  “But in addition to briefing the refugee and Latin America bureaus in Washington, you will have to go to San Salvador to brief Ambassador Corr,” Briggs told Gersony. Gersony dreaded having to brief Corr, who he thought already hated him.

  The same day he flew to San Salvador and briefed Corr, along with his DCM, David Dlouhy. Gersony spoke for less than a minute when Corr interrupted: “What’s the bottom line?”

  “It doesn’t make sense to move the camp. It’s not necessary. The camp is not strategic. What is going on in the camp doesn’t justify it. There are better solutions.”

  For the next few minutes Corr was angry at Gersony. Corr claimed the Hondurans were ready to move the camp and that Gersony was undermining U.S. policy in Central America. Then Dlouhy was angry at him, too. Gersony was thrilled. After all, not only had Ambassador Briggs, the Jesse Helms favorite, backed him up, but he felt that Gene Dewey, the moderate Republican military man, and Elliott Abrams, the neoconservative, would as well.

  Gersony went back to his New York apartment for a few days. But as soon as he arrived home that night, the phone rang. It turned out that Gene Dewey was in New York at the United Nations and wanted to see him, at six the next morning for breakfast. It was typical Dewey, like in Khartoum.

  At six a.m., the cafeteria at the United Nations building was completely empty. Dewey stormed in and they went to sit by a window.

  “Have you moved the camp yet?” Dewey said.

  Gersony began to brief his trip, his visit to Colomoncagua, and so on, but Dewey kept interrupting, “Have you moved the camp yet?” Gersony wasn’t eating his breakfast. He was tired, a bit sick, and nervous. Finally, Gersony said: “Gene,” looking Dewey in the eye, “it would be a big mistake to try to move this camp.” Gersony quietly walked Dewey through his logic. And this time Dewey listened.

  “All right then,” Dewey said. “You’ll have to brief Elliott.” Abrams took the news with good grace. The Honduran government and UNHCR were obviously relieved that the U.S. government was not going to force them to relocate the camp, even as they now had to patrol and occupy it.

  Decades later, Dewey tells me: “Looking back, I have a twinge of guilt for presupposing from my Washington perch the solution to the problem. This was a camp we learned from Bob to be run not by the Honduran government (or even by UNHCR, since none of its local staff had ever spent a night inside), but by El Salvadoran insurgent leaders who wielded total power, including capital punishment, over the camp residents. It was an insurgent justice system, devoid of the most basic human rights guarantees central to UNHCR’s own protection mandate.” Thanks to Gersony’s reporting, Dewey had the upper hand when he told the high commissioner Poul Hartling that UNHCR would have to do much more to protect the refugees. Gersony’s mere visit to Colomoncagua had concentrated the minds of the State Department bureaucracy, which in turn was able to bring more pressure on UNHCR to actually force its way inside the camp. And that is what happened.

  “Everyone in the Reagan administration assu
med we would have to move Colomoncagua further away from the border,” Elliott Abrams tells me. “But Bob explained why that wouldn’t work. It would have just meant more expense, more misery. Bob reversed the policy completely on his own. He told us things the whole bureaucracy was ignorant of.”

  Gersony really hadn’t done much. He had merely walked around inside the camp, then interviewed maybe two dozen NGO workers one-on-one outside it, and then conferred with the CIA in the embassy. It wasn’t like his work in western Sudan, and it certainly wasn’t the kind of epic, thorough reporting that would dramatically affect high policy, as he would later do in Mozambique, Rwanda, and elsewhere. But high policy can end in tragedy when the policymakers are ignorant of some of the basic, little things that any reporter picks up as a matter of course. This is how ground-level fieldwork, even of a minor sort, triumphs over the discussion of big abstract ideas with which Washington remains enamored. The Washington foreign policy community is marked here and there by affable operators with all the right degrees and résumés and connections to their names, who often know very little about the factual minutiae on the ground in far-flung places. Gersony was the opposite of such people in every way.

  * * *

  —

  What nobody could know then was that three years later the fall of the Berlin Wall would help take the momentum out of the Central American Left, and change history.

  * * *

  —

  Meanwhile, around the same time that Gersony had been busy with Colomoncagua, followed by an assignment on the Honduras-Nicaragua border, there were personnel changes at the State Department’s refugee programs bureau in Washington. These changes were a normal bureaucratic rotation, but constituted prologue to assignments much more dramatic than any others he had had so far. For Gersony was about to go back to Africa for a long stretch.

  CHAPTER 8

  Mozambique

  1987–1988

  “I Was Now in the Zone.”

  After Colomoncagua was settled, Gersony turned his attention for almost six months in 1987 to the Miskito Indians on the Atlantic coast straddling Honduras and Nicaragua, whose territory constituted a sideshow of the Sandinista-contra war. While there he got a message from the Bureau of Refugee Programs at the State Department that he was needed in Mozambique. His handlers this time would be different.

  Gene Dewey and his boss, Jim Purcell, had by now left the bureau. Dewey had become the United Nations deputy high commissioner for refugees in Geneva. Coming in as both President Reagan’s refugee coordinator and director of the Bureau of Refugee Programs was Jonathan Moore, whose new office was located on the State Department’s seventh floor adjacent to Secretary of State George Shultz himself. In other words, the refugee bureau and its boss had both been dramatically upgraded in importance.

  Jonathan Moore, who died in 2017, was an intimate friend and bureaucratic colleague of the eminent liberal Republican Elliot Richardson, who, like Moore, had served several presidents in a wide variety of key positions: both being the ultimate, selfless public servants of the kind that are now all too rare, the kind who are deeply moral without being ideological, while operating at the top of the power structure. Moore worked with Richardson at the Departments of Health, Education, and Welfare; Defense; Justice; and State. They both stood up to President Richard Nixon and subsequently resigned in the famous Saturday Night Massacre, but not before laying the groundwork for exposing the corruption of Vice President Spiro Agnew. Richardson was famously an old-fashioned Massachusetts patrician, and Moore—an unusually feisty Protestant of Italian and Irish background with ties to Dartmouth and Harvard, who used to love big, smelly cigars—was Richardson’s kind of guy.

  Moore was deeply spiritual without being specifically religious. He was funny, argumentative, loved a good political fight, but in the heat of battle was calm in the moment. He could think a problem to death through endless analysis, poring over every last detail, making him later on a great teacher at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Moore at this time was on his way to becoming legendary in the human rights community, and would later be lionized by Samantha Power, the great campaigner against genocide, who is also tied to Harvard.

  Moore, who believed it was only through fieldwork that you could truly understand a situation,1 did not know and had never heard of Bob Gersony. But someone he deeply respected, Sheppie Abramowitz, did. Sheppie and her husband, Mort, were emerging as the first Washington power couple of the human rights community in a practical, operational, and diplomatic sense. Mort was a heavy-hitting ambassador and assistant secretary of state close to Shultz. Sheppie dedicated her professional life to refugee issues. They were, like Gersony—albeit on a much more prestigious level—able to combine a deep commitment to human rights with the necessities of national interest. Baked into their worldview was the notion that realism without a sufficient dose of idealism was not realistic at all. Sheppie went to see Jonathan Moore and told him that he simply had to utilize Bob Gersony. Margaret McKelvey, who worked on the Africa desk at the refugee bureau, told Moore the same thing.

  And that was that.

  Moore told Gersony that he wanted him to go to Mozambique, where a civil war was raging and a million refugees had fled into half a dozen neighboring countries—in addition to another million who were internally displaced inside Mozambique itself. But the problem was that the Africa bureau had yet to grant Gersony permission. After all, Gersony had created difficulties for the Africa bureau in Uganda, Sudan, and Chad. Chet Crocker was still the assistant secretary of state for African affairs. But he now had a new principal deputy assistant secretary, Chas Freeman, the former DCM in Bangkok who had been so supportive of Gersony’s work on South China Sea anti-piracy. It was Chas who broke the logjam at the Africa bureau, and so Gersony prepared to go off to Mozambique.

  State Department refugee coordinator Jonathan Moore, who sent Bob to Mozambique in 1988 and supported his work all along. On the other side of Bob is Moore’s wife, Katie.

  It was an assignment that would launch Gersony’s reputation as a humanitarian into the stratosphere among Washington insiders.

  But the assignment did not at first excite Gersony. Gene Dewey had imbued Gersony with a concern for root causes. For example: Why were refugees fleeing a country in the first place? What exactly had happened to them? But root causes did not seem to be part of this new assignment. He was told only to check on how UNHCR and the other NGOs were dealing with the Mozambique exodus: were the refugees getting enough food, sufficient basic health care—mundane stuff. Little did he know what he was getting himself into.

  Before leaving he paid a ten-minute, meet-and-greet courtesy call on Chet Crocker, the assistant secretary of state for Africa. Chester Arthur Crocker, four years older than Gersony, was the ultimate upper-crust Brahmin, the son of a New York investment banker and a descendant of Chester Alan Arthur, America’s twenty-first president. That being said, he harbored a fiercely independent Holden Caulfield streak in him, having dropped out of Andover and lived on his own, before enrolling in Ohio State University. He would ultimately turn out to be a real theological Republican of the old school, straight out of early- and mid-twentieth-century Americana, who with his owlish glasses and balding head had the tweedy looks to match. Alternatively, as Chas Freeman recalls, Chet Crocker was “a European conservative rather than an American conservative,” meaning he had an “elegant vision of how to produce change” as opposed to a nativist one, and was a moderate as opposed to a radical.2

  U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Chester A. Crocker, who sent Gersony to Mozambique in 1988.

  Crocker, a reserved man who often seemed slightly annoyed, was at the moment a deeply embattled assistant secretary of state. His policy of constructive engagement toward the apartheid regime in South Africa was being torn apart by the entire American Left and liberal senator Ted Kenn
edy in particular. Meanwhile, hard right-wing Republicans completely distrusted him because of the demands for liberalization he was making on the apartheid regime as part of his constructive engagement policy. It was a no-win situation. Senator Jesse Helms hated Crocker as much as Ted Kennedy did. The North Carolina Republican had even held up Crocker’s nomination for assistant secretary for months, and after he was confirmed kept trying to have him fired. And then there was the epic war in Angola that Crocker had to deal with, pitting pro-Cuban Marxists against Western-supported guerrillas who were a component of the Reagan Doctrine to roll back communism. Crocker’s goal, which few at the time believed he could accomplish, was to get the Cubans to withdraw from Angola in return for South Africa granting independence to sprawling Namibia, located between South Africa and Angola. The fact was that after the Portuguese had left southern Africa, the Soviets and their east bloc allies were desperately trying to fill the vacuum—and the white South Africans had no intention of letting them do so. Fighting raged. This made the region a bloody hot zone of the Cold War, and the Washington policy battles were almost as brutal as the actual fighting itself. “Africa divided Washington in the 1980s to a degree that few can imagine in our own era,” says Frederick Ehrenreich, a longtime Africa specialist at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research.