at the office, I wrote up my message. Remole made a few sensible changes to my draft, and I got it typed on cable stationery by our secretary. Remole told me to take it along to the deputy chief of mission (DCM) and duck, because the DCM was a nitpicker. The DCM read it immediately, found the one typographical error, fixed it, signed off and said, “Congratulations on your first message from Kinshasa.”
Remole was a thoroughly decent guy, but was so offended by our policy toward Mobutu that he could not keep his views to himself when speaking to his boss, DCM Alan Davis. Davis (also an honorable man) had come to dread being lectured by his subordinate. When Remole found that I got on well with Davis, he took to using me as his messenger to the front office, where the DCM sat.
It got a bit awkward for me one day when my boss wrote a cable in which he used a bit of ironic humor. I read it before bringing it up to Davis to sign off on. I said to Remole that I thought ironic humor was always tricky when written down; it could so easily be misunderstood in Washington. Remole was rather proud of his clever remark and told me to take the cable along to the DCM. I did, but Davis sent it back to be retyped with a red line through the humorous bit. Remole showed me the mutilated cable and, with his hand shaking, said something to the effect of, “Nobody seems to want to know my views, but can’t I even make a little joke once in a while?”
I felt sorry for both him and the DCM, and a little anxious not to be caught in the middle of a battle between them. And then I remembered a quotation I had read from the great eighteenth-century wit, Dr. Samuel Johnson, who once recalled that an old tutor had said: “Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage you think is particularly fine, strike it out.” I typed it out and put it on my boss’s desk after he had left for the day.
The next morning Remole was in his cubicle when I came in, and I found my note back on my desk. He had scratched out “strike it out” and replaced it with, “cut it in half.” I laughed out loud, because, as anyone who reads my written work knows, I am addicted to overlong sentences. When Remole came back to his cubicle after lunch, the paper was back in front of him with my one-word comment: “Touché.” I heard him guffaw.
I hoped to have more demarches to make, but few came my way, and I began to wonder again what my job would amount to. The ambassador was still not using me to meet his plane or carry his bag. Fortunately, about then I acquired a new item in my portfolio that would gradually take up much of my time and even more of my interest. Robby, who was trying to pass on some of his work as he prepared to leave that summer, got the idea of passing on his entire contact list of interesting Congolese dissidents to me.
That is why, in January 1979, I found myself one afternoon taking a car ride alone with a total stranger, a tough-looking young Congolese, to an unknown destination. That car ride brought me to what turned out to be one of the most useful learning experiences of my diplomatic career.
The Shah of Iran had just fallen, and the State Department stood accused of not having prepared for his fall by troubling to get to know the people who might take over after him. So the word had gone out to the political sections of overseas posts such as the US Embassy in Kinshasa, where we were for Cold War reasons on close terms with President-for-life Mobutu, that someone should cultivate the dissidents, the people who, without promoting violence, opposed the country’s dictator. In my embassy, thanks to Robby’s introductions, I was that someone.
What made me the ideal choice was that I was the officer least likely to worry President Mobutu’s secret intelligence chief; I was the junior-most officer in the political section and a woman. Also, although I had been a diplomat’s wife more than twenty years by then, I had been a diplomat myself less than seven years. I was officially in the consular career track, not political. Everyone knew that the only reason I had a job in Kinshasa’s political section was because the embassy wanted John as its economic counselor and his price for going there had been a job for me.
A barrier to my getting to know the political dissidents was that members of the country’s parliament were not permitted to go to a foreign diplomat’s house without the prior permission of the head of Mobutu’s secret intelligence service. This was a limitation that no diplomat from a free country can accept, but it was imperative that, if we met with these politicians, we did so in a way that would not put them in danger.
Moreover, it soon became obvious to me that the people of the Congo were unaccustomed to dealing with a Western woman who was not a missionary, a nun, or the wife of a bwana (the Swahili term for a white man, usually a colonial boss). Of the politicians I needed to get to know, few of them had wives with even a high school education, and still fewer of these men had any experience dealing with a woman diplomat.
I had discreetly invited some dissident members of parliament—chosen by Robby because of the high regard their colleagues had for them—to dinner at John’s and my apartment. The dinner party took place, and several of the dissidents came (leaving their wives at home), but the leading politician among them simply did not appear. We all felt his absence. I thought he might be understandably cautious about breaking the rule on going to a diplomat’s home without informing the secret police, but still I was disappointed. He was the one the others most respected; I doubted the others would come again to see me, given the risk, if he did not show that he was willing to do so.
It was now the afternoon of the next day and, at the embassy, our secretary said I had a visitor. I went downstairs to the lobby and was handed an unsigned handwritten note delivered by a tough-looking young Congolese. I guessed that the note was probably from my missing guest; it said I should go with the messenger in his car.
The thought crossed my mind that this might be a risky thing to do. The Congo was a dangerous place then; the Kolwezi massacre in which hundreds of Europeans had been murdered had happened the year before. But then I thought: If the note really came from my missing guest, it would be worth my taking a chance to talk to the country’s leading nonviolent dissident politician.
The messenger drove to an unfamiliar part of the city, where my being white made me stand out. There were few traffic lights, and Congolese men, women, and children were dodging traffic every few yards to try to cross the wide road. The road had potholes everywhere. Of the cars parked alongside, most lacked hubcaps and windshield wipers and some were without tires. Although in Kinshasa it rained most days, there seemed to be dust everywhere. Overhead above the road were cement and metal pedestrian walkways that were missing stairs up to them or were broken off halfway across their arc. They looked to have been abandoned in mid-construction years earlier.
The driver parked the car on the sidewalk, and we entered a dusty, dimly lighted café. The furniture looked shabby and dirty. The only contrast to this dismal scene came from a radio, which was blasting forth the vibrant Congolese popular music of the day. A pair of big, well-built young men, who were seated at a table, I presumed to be bodyguards. Behind them in a corner was seated the “no-show” of my dinner party. The driver made a gesture to point him out to me and went outside to wait to drive me back.
The man stood up—he was a very big, tall man—and indicated that I sit on the wooden chair across from him. We both sat down. There was no offer to buy me a drink and the conversation (in French) was brief.
He: “You invited me to dinner at your place last night.”
I: “Yes, I did.”
He: “I didn’t come.”
I: “I noticed.”
He: “I didn’t know what rules you play by.”
It was then that I realized that he had no precedents, no rules, for his dealings with me—a woman and a diplomat—and that he had sent the ball into my court. Suddenly aware that a
