I said I would try, but wished I hadn’t when I looked at the draft. There was no way I could edit this in a quick and discreet way so as not to embarrass the drafter—who was a nice young man of considerable cultivation, despite his awkwardness with a pen. It was clear that he had spent many hours on this long, convoluted message, with lots of repeated bits. It was as if (which seemed likely) he had tried putting sentences and the odd paragraph first in one place and then in another, and forgot to remove them from their earlier position. In the privacy of the file room, taking scissors, I cut the cable into several segments and removed the redundant text. After putting the stray sentences into what looked to be the right paragraphs, and the paragraphs into an order that seemed to make sense, I retyped them in that order. I edited, as I went, conserving as much of his wording as I could. Seeing the horrified look on his face when he picked up the new draft, I hastened to say: “You remember those hilarious advertisements for cheap records of the classics? The ones that promised you all nine Beethoven symphonies on two LPs with ‘all the unnecessary repetitions left out’? Well, that is all I did here. This is still your text, your cable.”
At this point fate intervened in the form of a wonderfully helpful colleague, Harlan “Robby” Robinson. Robby was the number two of the section, a civil servant who was on loan from the Africa Office of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Unlike most of the rest of us, including me, Robby spoke flawless French. He also knew a lot about Africa, including the Congo, from previous study. Also, he had already been in this job for two years and had extended for a third year. He came over and said, “Judy, if you have nothing better to do, I suggest you accompany a friend of mine, David Gould, who has just turned up. He’s a famous academic on the Congo; he’s the man who first used the term kleptocracy to describe the Mobutu regime. He is going out to the University of Kinshasa where he has lots of interesting Congolese friends on the faculty you could meet.”
I wondered if our boss would let me be away from the office on my second day at work in his section, but Remole said, “Oh yes, that’s a good idea of Robby’s! I should have thought of it myself. Go ahead!” (Given the much stronger centripetal forces in embassies nowadays, I doubt that any boss now would have let me out of the embassy in the company of somebody not on his staff on my second day in the office.)
As it happened, nothing could have been a better introduction for me to some of the smartest and kindest Congolese in Kinshasa than being passed on to them by Professor Gould. Gould was a man they all admired (and whom they would mourn when, some years later, he was killed in the Lockerbie air crash tragedy). After a day in the professor’s company, during which his Congolese academic friends and their wives included me in their (literally) warm embrace—because it looked odd to be hugging him and not me—I invited these academics to a buffet supper at our apartment. I already knew that the Zairian government (their employer) tried to discourage contacts with American diplomats. For this reason, some of my embassy colleagues tried to prepare me for a disappointing turnout at my party, but almost all the professors and wives I invited came.
I began to realize how fortunate it was that our apartment was situated on the eleventh floor of one of Kinshasa’s few attractive modern buildings. Our guests enjoyed the spectacular view from our terrace of the widest part of the Congo River, just where the rapids start to push the river 850 feet downward and nearly a hundred miles westward to the Atlantic Ocean. I came to realize only later, when my work portfolio changed, that one of the biggest pluses of where John and I lived was that it was in a big apartment building occupied by many Congolese and other VIPs. From outside, Mobutu’s intelligence services could not guess whose apartment a visitor was coming to.
I was finding to my surprise and delight that being a woman was not a handicap to being a diplomat in the Congo. One of my new Congolese friends pointed out that people could recognize me because I was wearing a skirt, whereas many Congolese had difficulty distinguishing one white face from another. Indeed, the only problems I had as a woman diplomat in the Congo came from within my own embassy. A few weeks into my new job in Kinshasa, I was still waiting to be called to meet the ambassador’s plane and carry his bags when I found to my chagrin that he was calling on my more senior colleagues in the political section to do what was clearly my job as protocol officer. I finally got up the nerve to go see the ambassador and ask him straight out why he wasn’t letting me do my protocol job.
The ambassador was a career officer but a rather conventional kind of man and had evidently not been raised by a mother like mine. He grudgingly confessed that he felt uncomfortable about having the wife of his economic counselor getting up in the middle of the night to meet his plane and carry his suitcases. Knowing that John did not share his views, I had my answer ready: “How do you think it makes me feel—or, for that matter, the poor guy who has to get up in the night to do my job—that you are not letting me do what I am assigned to do?”
Taken aback, he said, “I never thought of that.”
“Well, sir,” I said, “I am asking you to think of it from now on.”
Fortunately, I got on well with my boss, Bob Remole, who came from the mountains of the Far West and was more devoted to Save the Planet, World Wildlife Fund, and Amnesty International issues than to the conduct of traditional foreign policy. Dismayed at how little room there was in the State Department’s realpolitik foreign policy for someone with his priorities, he was planning to retire at the end of this tour.
Remole was upset that our government was, for Cold War reasons, on such supportive terms with President Mobutu, a half-educated, charismatic African dictator. Mobutu’s chief virtue for us was that he was not a communist and he allowed us to use staging places in his country to support rebels in neighboring communist-led Angola. (I did not then know—though I suspected—the big role of the CIA in putting him in power and keeping him there.)
Mobutu was notorious for his own corrupt acts and for encouraging corruption by his government. The rot ran from the top ministers on down to the cop on the beat, the soldier on patrol, even the prison guard. In recent years Mobutu had presented himself as a nearly God-like figure in his television broadcasts and had bestowed on himself ever more high-flown titles, one of his more modest being that of Zaire’s Guide Eclairé (enlightened guide).
My boss passed on to me the useful fact that Dean Hinton, our current ambassador’s predecessor, had been declared persona non grata (PNG) and expelled by Mobutu, allegedly for having shown disdain for the Enlightened Guide of Zaire by arriving one weekend afternoon at the official presidential residence in his tennis shorts to deliver an urgent message to Mobutu from Washington. According to Remole, our current ambassador lived in terror of being PNG’d himself. The barely hidden, though unspoken, moral of this story went: It would be best to avoid doing things that would anger Mobutu, because the ambassador would probably not back you up.
I occasionally had more substantive work to do than meeting my ambassador’s plane. In November 1978, soon after I came officially onto Kinshasa’s payroll, I was assigned to make my first demarche. As I explained in a letter to my mother: “This is where I go to the Foreign Ministry and say (in French) that ‘my government has instructed me to say. . . .’ And then I listen with yogic concentration while the man in charge of—in this case—United Nations affairs replies. I then make notes the moment I escape from his office and send a cable to Washington telling his part of it.”
I enjoyed doing it. I went over without phoning ahead because, as often happened, neither our phones nor theirs were working. When I finally took the elevator to an upper floor where he had his office, he was out, and I waited fully an hour for him to return. He turned out to be an extremely pleasant Congolese in his midthirties who spoke good French and was able to cope on the spot with the subject, saying nicely quotable things in reply to my demarche. I left his room, but by then the elevator had conked out and I had to descend the six flights to the accompaniment of cries of “Bon courage, Madame” at each landing,
