The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2011

J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 1 1 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 71 of Iran, who, for an hour, answered their wide-ranging ques- tions. Most elicited impressive answers, except perhaps for the annual, inevitable query about his opposition. “A mere nuisance,” he assured them, “which will not impede Iran’s march to greatness.” On another occasion, I was escort officer for Senator Charles Percy, D-Ill., who had a private audience with His Imperial Majesty while his staffers and I waited outside. After a bell rang, we were ushered in to be introduced by the senator. At the end of the list he added, “And of course, you know Henry Precht.” I can still hear that booming im- perial silence. A few years later I was the Iran desk officer as the Peacock Throne began to show deep cracks. I argued against those who wanted the shah to use the iron fist to quell his op- ponents, believing that liberalization of the regime might improve the U.S. po- sition in Iran. Before his fall, the shah came to know my name and told an in- terviewer I was a “son-of-bitch Mc- Governite.” Few FSOs, I suspect, have been so creatively cursed. As the Iranian Revolution neared its climax — the shah fled, the Ayatollah Khomeini returned, Prime Minister Shapour Bakhtiar tried and failed to run the state — Marvin Kalb used a news broadcast to flag the split between the White House and State: “The White House says it fully supports Bakhtiar; State officers say he is doomed.” The next morning I was summoned to the White House and found, seated at a huge round table, everyone senior to me in the department, from assistant secretaries to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. President Jimmy Carter entered. He was livid. Referring to the Kalb pro- gram, he said, “We cannot conduct effective policy when dissenting opinions are leaked to undercut us. The next time this happens, the leaker will be fired, and so will his boss.” He stormed out. One assistant secretary, glancing at me, called the presi- dent unfair. (Actually, I agreed with him and had not leaked, although many in the department knew my views.) Sec. Vance, ever the healer, cautioned, “We hear what the presi- dent said, and he is right. Now, let us forget this meeting, but remember his message.” Three weeks later, someone leaked a report of the meet- ing to the New Republic. Eventually, the shah’s hex worked. Senator Jesse Helms, R-N.C., blocked my appointment as ambassador to Mauri- tania because “this fellow brought down one king who was our friend, and we don’t want to put him close to another one” (the king of Morocco). My approach to that neighbor- ing royal realm foiled, I was assigned as deputy chief of mis- sion in Cairo in July 1981. Off Bended Knee Shortly after arriving, I was taken by the ambassador on an introductory call on President Anwar Sadat in his Delta village home —more like a McMansion with very high walls in the suburbs. Sadat began to tell us his strategy for forth- coming talks with Israel in Washington when a helicopter was heard outside and Vice President Hosni Mubarak entered. After being introduced, he joined us in the circle, like me, a silent notetaker. A few months later, he was president. As chargé d’affaires I had a number of meetings with Mubarak, one of which was particularly stressful. Two high-level U.S. delegations arrived si- multaneously, each with three or four members of Congress and six or seven constituents, for a grand total of more than 20 men. The Egyptian president normally met visitors in a small office with space for just five or six guests at most. I asked advice from the chief of protocol, who insisted that only members of Con- gress were welcome — no private citizens. When I told the assembled throng that a trip to the bazaar would be arranged for the excluded travelers, the head of one delegation said he could not abandon them: “They paid my way; I must stay with them.” But the leader of the other group whispered to me, “I can see you’re in a spot; we’ll go with you on the bazaar tour.” When I took the pragmatic Representative Dick Cheney, R-Wyo., and his two colleagues for the audience, Mubarak exclaimed, “What’s this? I thought there would be two dozen of you.” When I made my farewell call on the president several years later, he greeted me with a wry smile. “Well, Henry, you were here four years, and we didn’t have an Islamic rev- olution,” he remarked. I responded with an even weaker smile, not yet imagining that his tenure would some day rival that of Ramses II in its longevity. But my own time at the top was over. All I was left with was the need for two joint replacements, the consequence of so much career time spent on bended knee. My experience with the king of Saudi Arabia was an inauspicious start for a career of service to sovereigns.