The Foreign Service Journal, March 2014

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MARCH 2014 31 And he took the text out of his pocket and gave it to the Chi- nese. And so they had it. Later Ji Chaozhu, who did the interpreting, consulted with me on a number of points before he did it. Indeed, it did contain some of Chairman Mao’s poetry, and it would have been cata- strophic for me to do it. So my first act as interpreter of Chinese (this was my debut as interpreter; I had never interpreted except in a classroom) was to refuse to interpret. … As we sat through the banquet, I was at the head table with Nixon and Zhou Enlai and Henry Kissinger and Ji Dengfei and Li Xiannian, later president of China, and, I think, Qiao Guanhua, who was, in fact, the brains in the Foreign Ministry, and [Secre- tary of State] Bill Rogers, of course, and Mrs. Nixon—interpreting for them. I could see the president glaring at me across the table, with his jowls down and a grim expression on his face, obviously mighty annoyed that I had pulled this stunt. I have thought a lot about why he might have wished to con- ceal the fact that there was a text. The fact is that he had a habit of memorizing speeches, and he liked to appear to be ad-libbing them, giving them extemporaneously, which is what Dwight Chapin had told me he planned to do. And I think he was afraid I would stand up there with the text, which I wouldn’t have done, of course. In any event, he also had a predilection for using the other side’s interpreters, because they wouldn’t leak to the U.S. press and Congress. So all these things came together. Two days later, after some other things had happened, Nixon apologized to me. He called me over and said, “I’m sorry. I made a mistake. That was wrong. I shouldn’t have done that.” And there were tears in his eyes. Then he did some other things that were by way of making amends. It was odd. I did not smoke at that time. I had given it up nine years previously, when I was in law school. I remember Li Xiannian, then the sort of economic planner of China, later the president, offering me a cigarette. I took it, and I have smoked ever since. I was terribly nervous. n 1980s: Stranded in Siberia The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty marked a turn- ing point in relations between the U.S. and the USSR. Signed in December 1987 by President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, the treaty came into force on June 1, 1988. It was the first treaty ever to destroy nuclear missiles, rather than just cap the number each side could possess. Eileen Malloy was posted to Moscow right after the treaty was signed and worked directly with the Soviet government to facilitate the visits of U.S. inspection teams. In this part of her oral history, she describes an unexpectedly prolonged stay in Siberia in the dead of winter. v W hen I arrived in Moscow in January 1988 to take on this huge challenge, the Soviets were not very good about dealing with women—and I was a pregnant female. They just did not know what to do with me at all. I was there for two years, working with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Soviet Nuclear Military Center to make sure that the American teams who would land at the portal entries to conduct surprise inspections were able to reach their sites. … The teams had to be able to land either in Moscow or the portal that was in Siberia, Ulan Ude; announce where they wanted to go anywhere in the Soviet Union; and reach that location within a certain number of hours. So it was very complex. We were the ones who translated, met them at the airport, made sure that the U.S. military plane was serviced, just got the whole thing going, and then, whenever there was a dispute, we would conduct negotiations with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. But it was all virgin terrain. Nobody had ever done this before so we were making it up as we were going along. … Once, when I had to go to Ulan Ude [in 1990] to meet an unannounced inspection, Captain Sandy Schmidt went with me. The two of us were responsible for all the diplomatic escort duties, which involved getting up an hour before we had to go to the airport to thaw out the Jeep, which was frozen solid because it was minus 30 degrees in the garage. And then Sandy had to do all these complex things to get this Soviet Jeep running. I never learned to drive a stick shift, but fortunately she had. We got ourselves out to the airport and planned to get the team off to their inspection site, hand them over to their Soviet handlers, and be done with work for two days until the team returned to Ulan Ude. Or so we thought. The Air Force plane came trembling in over the horizon, this enormous C-130, the big transport plane. It was so cold and the I could see the president glaring at me across the table, with his jowls down and a grim expression on his face. –Chas Freeman