The Foreign Service Journal, May 2022

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MAY 2022 11 Time to Reorient I have returned to Bucharest, Roma- nia, after two long COVID-19 years to empty and sell the little apartment I have had here for the last quarter century. As I write, Putin’s forces surround Kyiv, and war is much on people’s minds. Last night I spent two hours with a dear friend who is a former foreign minister and Ukraine expert. The letter arises from the fact that no one in the U.S. embassy will talk to him or benefit from his insights. Sitting here, looking at a profession I know well from the inside but is now at a remove, there are three major mistakes that we Americans have been making in Romania and possibly in other countries, as well. The first is that we won’t talk to people who aren’t “nice” or don’t agree with us or have some stain on their escutch- eon. My friend from last night is a case in point, but perhaps a better example is Corneliu Vadim Tudor. Vadim was, in fact, fairly odious in many ways: He was an ultranationalist politician who pandered to the worst instincts of his supporters with anti-Semitic and homo- phobic editorials. That said, he had a strong following—26 percent of the popular vote for president at one point—and was both influential and influenceable. After I retired, a friend asked if I wanted tomeet him. I did, and we became “friends” of a sort. Then a senator and still influential, Vadim asked me what he had to do to make the Americans accept him. I replied honestly that I wasn’t sure, but he had to stop the anti-Semitic and homophobic rhetoric if he wanted even a chance. He did so immediately. I don’t think Vadim was actually anti-Semitic—it was simply a nasty ploy. He even hired two Israeli PR advisers, though they were, according to another friend, only window dressing. Nice young men; I met them. The important point here is that if we don’t talk to people, we can’t understand their thinking or hope to influence them. Neither can we gain a complete pic- ture of what is happening in their country. The secondmistake has been to criti- cize Romania in public. Aside frombeing against the tenets of the Geneva Conven- tion, this is just plain stupid as it wins us no friends and gives us no long-term influ- ence. I brought this up with a U.S. diplomat here, and the answer was: “It’s the only way we canmake themdo anything.” Excuse me? Perhaps some politicians were forced to do something for fear of public U.S. criticism, but the Romanians resent the U.S. for it. The thirdmistake came tomy atten- tion in Greece. We only talk to “important” people, and when politicians lose elections or retire, they are often dropped fromour overfull rosters. In this case the politician said, “What they don’t understand is that our politics are a revolving door, and I will be back in power in the future. Your diplomats will forget they droppedme when they thought I wasn’t important ... but I won’t.” In the U.S., retirement and age throw people into a gray area of nonexistence as far as their former profession is con- cerned, but this is not the case in many other countries. Here, in Bucharest, all of these problems are compounded by the unfortunate move of the embassy out of town, even though the GOR had offered us an excellent central location for it. No one I know has talked to a U.S. diplomat in years, if ever. Our officers are sequestered in a fortress that my friends won’t go near; it’s too far away and the security procedures are humiliating. And it’s difficult for our officers to come into town to venues where they could meet them given tight control of motor pool resources, limited parking and enormous traffic. There are fixes, some fairly easy, some not. We need to reorient our thinking about who is “important” and who isn’t. We need more motor pool and represen- tational resources. We ought to encourage officers to get out, walk the street, go to art openings, have interests that bring them into contact with a wide array of Roma- nians, and make time for them to do this. And we need to be more careful about the advice we are given by local staff as to who we see and who we avoid. Kiki Skagen Munshi FSO, retired Julian, California Moscow Signal I amwriting to salute Jim Schumaker’s article ( “Before Havana Syndrome, There Was Moscow Signal, ” January-February 2022) and commend him for his bravery and professionalism. He has long been known for his stellar work on Soviet affairs. When reports of Havana syndrome started hitting the press recently, I, too, immediately thought of Embassy Moscow and my experiences there. As Jim points out, this is hardly a new topic for many old Soviet hands. An earlier summary of the “Moscow Signal” may be found in an old article by Lee Hockstader, “Top Hat to Cap OffMos- cow Embassy Saga” ( The Washington Post , Feb. 22, 1996). He outlines some of the long history of radiation being directed at Embassy Moscow, especially microwave, and points to “an Old Orthodox Church across the street, which U.S. investigators dubbed our Lady of Telemetry.”