The Foreign Service Journal, March 2017

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MARCH 2017 17 as well as the work of such colleagues as Tatiana Gfoeller (later ambassador to Kyrgyzstan) on religious issues and tensions, who also complemented our reporting on Yeltsin. The reason I am compelled to men- tion this reporting dynamic now is that historians are unlikely to figure any of this out any time soon. So while I am still able, I want to try and see to it that my people, who analyzed events more from economic and social perspectives and less from political vantage points and Kremlinology, receive recognition for basically getting it right from the get-go and throughout this critical period. The Last Ones Out Finally, I certainly salute the brave acts of the communications processing unit (CPU) in Moscow and was mesmerized by Tim Lawson’s article, which high- lighted the March 1991 embassy fire. When the fire broke out, I was in a meeting in the executive suite. Deputy Chief of Mission Jim Collins turned to the head of the Adminstrative Section, Joe Hulings, asking him if it was a drill. When he said that it was not, I ran to my section. As Mr. Lawson describes it, the fire moved very quickly. But, despite smoke and extreme danger, my staff stayed and locked up all their materials and safes before trying to exit the building. When my group got down to the third floor, the staircase was on fire. As a thick, carpet-like plume of solid black smoke moved toward us up the stairs, I was asked whether we should go back up. I yelled to everyone to take a deep breath and run down the staircase with me, and not go back upstairs. They followed me down through two flights of stairs on fire, through the dense, punishing smoke, where I finally hit the exit door whose frame was totally aflame. It did not budge; and I thought we were dead. At that moment, Roman Wasilevski, a fine reporting officer—who, fortuitously, was tall—backed up and hit the door again and again until it burst open. Unfortunately, a waterfall of flam- ing debris from elevator construction prevented us from exiting, and the heat and toxic air was fast overcoming us. At that point, Mike Desaro noticed that if we moved very carefully to the right on a sill, it might just be possible to exit by shimmying between the waterfall of flames and the wall. Although some of us were burned slightly, we all escaped and went over a wall—that last step, the harrowing ordeal of us getting over the wall and down to safety, was pictured on the front page of The New York Times the next day. I admire the courage of the CPU team. We did not re-enter as they did, but I am pretty sure it was the members of the Economic Section who were the last ones out. n Throughout the three years I was in charge of the economic, commercial and labor reporting from Moscow, we tried to weigh objectively for Washington each of a long parade of successive economic reform packages.