The Foreign Service Journal, May 2008

Mr. Ferguson retired in 1986, and settled in Vista, Calif., where he began a new career as a computer consultant and grew avocados and exotic fruits. He enjoyed travel — to China, England, Italy and other places — as well as bridge, opera, theatre and friends and family. In 1996, he relo- cated to Point Loma in San Diego. Survivors include his wife of 54 years, Daryl Ferguson; daughters Andrea Leach and Holly Rio; and grandchildren Tony Leach, Jamie Leach, Andre Rio and Melanie Rio. The family requests that commemora- tive donations be made to the Scripps Health foundation, 10666 North Tor- rey Pines Road #109N, La Jolla CA 92037. The donations will be desig- nated to the bone-marrow transplant program. Samuel J. Hamrick , 78, a retired FSO who wrote spy novels under the pseudonym W.T. Tyler, died of colon cancer on Feb. 29 at his home in Boston, Va. Mr. Hamrick was born on Oct. 19, 1929, in Lubbock, Tex. A 1951 gradu- ate of the University of Louisville in Kentucky, he served with U.S. Army counterintelligence from 1951 to 1953. After working in the private sector for eight years, Mr. Hamrick joined the Foreign Service in 1961. During a 19-year diplomatic career, he served in Beirut, St. John’s, St. Pierre and Miquelon, Montreal, Kinshasa, Addis Ababa and Khartoum. “One of the greats of the Foreign Service in my time” is the way former colleague Bob Keeley remembers Hamrick, adding that he was “outspoken, ethical, seri- ous, intelligent, humorous, reliable and ‘not successful’ for all of the right reasons.” Shortly after leaving the State Department in 1980, Mr. Hamrick published his first novel. The Man Who Lost the War (Dial Press) tells the story of a disillusioned Central Intelligence Agency operative at the time of the Berlin Wall crisis in the early 1960s. Two novels on East-West proxy wars in Africa followed: The Ants of God (Dial Press, 1981), set in Sudan; and Rogue’s March (Harper & Row, 1982), set in the Congo. Mr. Hamrick wrote three more novels: The Shadow Cabinet (Harper & Row, 1984), The Lion and the Jackal (Lin- den Press/Simon & Schuster, 1988) and The Consul’s Wife (Henry Holt, 1998), the latter two set in Africa. Rogue’s March , which features a traitorous intelligence officer mod- elled on British counterspy Kim Phil- by, was rejected by Mr. Hamrick’s British publisher. As Stuart Lavietes wrote in his obituary of the author for the New York Times , this decision reinforced Hamrick’s admitted anti- British attitudes, a predisposition that had earlier led him to a pen name derived fromWat Tyler, the leader of a bloody peasant rebellion in 14th-cen- tury England. In a 1984 profile in the New York Times , Mr. Hamrick ex- pressed displeasure at being com- pared to British writers John le Carré and Graham Greene because he felt both were hostile to Americans. In 1994, he served briefly as a State Department consultant in Somalia, a country he knew well. Mr. Hamrick wrote one book under his own name, Deceiving the Deceivers (Yale University Press, 2004). In this revisionist history of the Kim Philby case, he argues that Philby and his associates, exposed in 1967 for passing top-secret information to the Soviets, had, in fact, been unwitting tools in a disinformation campaign staged by their superiors in British intelligence. Mr. Hamrick’s marraige to Joan Neurath Hamrick ended in divorce. In addition to his companion of 12 years, Nancy Ely-Raphel, Mr. Ham- rick is survived by four children from his marriage, Samuel Jennings III of Seattle and John of Port Angeles, Wash., Hugh of Paris, and Anne Hamrick Burns of Greencastle, Pa.; three sisters; and five grandchildren. George M. Humphrey , 72, a retired FSO living in Berlin, Germany, died there of a sudden cardiac arrest on Sept. 11, 2007. Born in Albany, N.Y., Mr. Hump- hrey grew up in State College, Pa. He graduated from Antioch College in 1958 and, in 1960, received a master’s degree in international relations from the Johns Hopkins School of Ad- vanced International Studies. That same year, he joined the Foreign Ser- vice. His first assignment, along with several other Russian-speaking junior officers, was to act for a year as a guide/interpreter on U.S. traveling cultural exhibitions in the USSR. With these exhibits, Mr. Humphrey spent considerable time in Moscow, Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), Kiev, Kharkov, Tbilisi and Stalingrad (now Volgograd). Having daily contact with Soviet citizens gave him a deeper than usual insight into the mindset of per- sons belonging to all strata of Soviet society. Following this, he spent two years on short assignments to the Soviet and Cuban desks. In 1964, Mr. Humphrey was assigned to Port of Spain as a consular officer. From Trinidad, he moved to Vienna, serving as aide to Ambassador James Riddleburger. In 1970, Mr. Humphrey was sent again to the USSR, this time spending one year in the consular section and one year in the political section at Embassy Mos- cow. Having been awarded a congres- 70 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / M A Y 2 0 0 8 I N M E M O R Y