The Foreign Service Journal, February 2003

had already been involved in several African evacuations, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo (for- merly known as Zaire), Ethiopia, and Eritrea — due to civil and political strife — as well as several posts in East Asia and the Pacific due either to civil unrest or to heavy smoke from forest fires in the region. This involved taking the initial calls from post, alerting State Department offices and Washington agencies, setting up the task force, drafting spot and briefing reports, and main- taining communications with the affected posts. Then a civil war broke out in June 1998 in Guinea- Bissau — which also happened to be my first post, where I had served from 1993 to 1995. After five increasingly intense days of fighting in that small, extremely poor country, U.S. Ambassador Peggy Blackford and her staff were forced to abandon their residences in the housing compound across the street and band together in the chancery safe haven. (The post was reporting that rockets and motor rounds could be heard outside, suggesting the embassy was somewhere in the line of fire between government forces and the rebels.) Throughout the crisis, they had worked feverishly to ensure the safe passage from the country of a group of Peace Corps Volunteers, mis- sionaries and other American citizens. One by one, each volunteer was evacuated and every missionary and American who wanted to go was located and moved to safety, by road north to Senegal and west and south to Guinea, and by air to neighboring countries and to Europe. Once that task was accomplished on Saturday, June 13, 1998, the Embassy staff began focusing on their own evacuation from the capital. The Guinea-Bissau Task Force, staffed around the clock, had already been in operation for several days, of course, holding open a vital telephone link between Washington and Embassy Bissau. In the task force office, I overheard Consular Affairs Assistant Secretary Mary Ryan and Administration Bureau Assistant Secretary Pat Kennedy discussing the use of a port in the town of Prabis as an alternative evacuation site. As it happened, Mike Lukomski, the former USAID director, and I had gone on several fishing trips on that river when I was assigned to Embassy Bissau two years earlier, and each time, we launched the boat from Prabis. Once or twice, we had to cancel our fishing trip at the last minute because at low tide, the river practically disap- pears, cutting off access to the bay and the ocean. Recalling that fact, I informed the task force that no boat would be able to enter or exit the river at that point unless at high tide. Africa Bureau Executive Director Bob Manzanares, manning the task force that Saturday afternoon, then suggested a nearer point of debarka- tion, the port of Bandim. However, in describing that plan, he used as a reference the new, Chinese-built football stadium in Bissau, which he referred to by the name on his map, the 24th of September Stadium. That information was relayed to the folks at post, but no one was familiar with the port or the stadium, because no one in Bissau ever referred to either by its proper name. Most people when I was there called it the Chinese Stadium. I clarified for the task force the location of the port by mentioning a more familiar nearby landmark, the Swedish Tennis Camp, which embassy personnel instantly recognized. That port, less than a two-mile walk from the chancery, ended up being the point of embarkation the next day for the embassy staff. There only remained the question of tides and the possibility that a boat or ship could enter the river up to the point at the port of Bandim to effect the evacu- ation. The task force found it impossible to get tidal information for Bissau on a Saturday afternoon. F O C U S 34 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 3 Continued from page 31 Raymond Maxwell, an FSO since 1992, has served in Bissau, London, Luanda and Accra. He is currently a post management officer for East Africa. He received a Meritorious Honor Award from the Operations Center for his work in facilitating the evacuation. Once all non-official Americans had been safely evacuated, the embassy staff began focusing on their own departure from the capital.