The Foreign Service Journal, April 2008

Service culture of that era. But he always did his job, and his superiors loved him. His fitness reports were uniformly outstanding; he had ascend- ed as high as he could without becom- ing an ambassador. However, in the up-or-out Foreign Service, unless he was promoted — soon — he would be forced out. He had been told that the only problem was finding an open ambassadorship. Unfortunately, political considera- tions and cronyism often influenced those appointments. He was facing the prospect of having to start over again professionally — an older man, and now with a young family. In early 1971, he was summoned by higher-ups at the Department of State. They wanted to talk to him about a possible assignment. Father had served at the embassy in Niger. Was he familiar with Equatorial Guin- ea? What did he know about its gov- ernment? In particular, the question- ers kept coming back to a word that appeared repeatedly on Father’s fit- ness reports: “solid.” The men finally came to the point. A position had opened up in Equator- ial Guinea. The title was chargé d’af- faires. The position reported to the American ambassador in Yaoundé, who was also accredited to Equatorial Guinea. It was a small post; in fact, there would only be one other Ameri- can, an administrative officer. There would be no Marines, just the two FSOs and three Foreign Service Na- tionals. It would be a short tour, but the place was “challenging.” American tourists were advised not to go there. The dictator, President Francisco Macias Nguema, had led the country to its recent independence from Spain. The USSR, China and North Korea were active there. Macias resented Spain and theWestern powers. In par- ticular, he was hostile toward the United States. Three years before, a delegation of U.S. congressmen and their aides had visited the country under the auspices of the Red Cross. Macias had thrown them in prison without explanation; there was no U.S. diplomatic pres- ence at that time. (The president eventually released the delegation.) In 1969, the U.S. had evacuated its nationals from the country, under threat of a coup. But shortly after- ward, the Department of State estab- lished an embassy, albeit over the objections of State’s country director. Pres. Macias refused to meet with the U.S. ambassador from Yaoundé, call- ing him an assassin. Less than a year previously, the gov- ernment had seized Spain’s em- bassy and residence without warning; the Spanish diplomats managed to flee the country safely. The regime quickly reversed itself, however, and Madrid eventually returned its diplomats to Santa Isabel. Nevertheless, a prece- dent had been set: the regime did not respect, or perhaps simply did not understand, diplomatic sovereignty. The internal dynamics of Equator- ial Guinea were similar to of those North Korea. Citizens were forbid- den to talk to foreigners, including diplomats. Even diplomats were for- bidden to talk to any citizen or gov- ernment official, with the sole excep- tion of the chief of protocol at the Foreign Ministry, who was 20 years old. The secret police regularly entered diplomatic residences during receptions to make lists of the guests. The State Department men had a proposition. If Father was prepared to serve as chargé, it would be with a de facto understanding that he would receive an ambassadorial post before his up-or-out time ended. Was he interested? Father answered in the affirma- tive. He then received briefings. Equatorial Guinea was a small country on the western coast of Africa with a large volcanic outpost in its ter- ritorial waters called Fernando Po, a beautiful, primordial jungle island about the size of Maryland. The dic- tator had established the nation’s cap- ital, Santa Isabel, there. The country’s main source of rev- enue was cocoa. But the U.S. govern- ment was not interested in the cocoa but rather in Fernando Po’s deep- water ports, which had military poten- tial. The Soviets were aggressively expanding their influence in Africa at the time. They had evidently ap- proached Macias about a naval base. Father was instructed to find out more about that, and to try to improve rela- tions between Equatorial Guinea and the United States. My parents arrived in Santa Isabel on April 15, 1971. They moved into the residence, which was across the street from the main jail. The atmos- phere in the city was tense. Pres. Macias regularly issued dia- tribes on the radio and in newspapers against Spain, blasting the Spanish government as criminals and worse. Government thugs routinely harassed the Spanish expatriates in the coun- try; they beat one so badly in 1971 that the man suffered permanent brain damage. It was commonly known that Macias had personally murdered his foreign minister and beaten a political opponent to death in the palace. Many other unfortunates had met a similar fate. Usually the wives and children of his victims were also killed, sometimes in gruesome public spectacles; more often than not, their tribal villages were wiped out, also. On one occasion, Macias an- nounced that foreign assassins were hiding in trees in the capital, waiting to kill him. They would not succeed, he added, because he was immortal. Nonetheless, the residents of Santa Isabel awoke one morning to find the trees along a main boulevard cut down. In his addresses to the nation, 44 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / A P R I L 2 0 0 8